Are you running out of interesting article ideas but don’t want to miss out on updating your blog? Read on for a detailed guide to content syndication and how to solve duplicate content issues using the rel=canonical tag.
Content syndication is the process of sharing your original work to other platforms to attract more traffic and publishing other bloggers' work on your blog while keeping your blog updated. Content syndication is an effective aspect of content marketing, and many popular websites such as Lifehacker and Bufferblog use content syndication as part of their content planning and marketing strategy.
This article will focus on a very effective SEO tag, rel=canonical, and explore how to use it in content marketing.
But before I introduce rel=canonical and how to use it, you should also check out this article to get a deeper understanding of content curation, which will greatly help you in your content marketing process.
What is the rel=canonical tag in SEO?
Before we share some interesting SEO tips for content syndication, let’s first take a look at the basics and technical aspects of rel=canonical. Even if you don’t pay much attention to SEO, this tutorial will ensure you understand all aspects of rel=canonical.
The rel=canonical tag is an HTML tag that tells search engine robots that one URL is equivalent to another URL in search results. The main purpose of this tag is to avoid duplicate content on websites due to similar URL parameters or similar content.
The Canonical tag was introduced to help webmasters with similar or identical blog content deal with duplicate content. For example: if you run an e-commerce website and have enabled sorting (sort by price, sort by color), you can use the Canonical tag to tell search engine robots which page you want to rank. I will tell you how to add the Canonical tag in the simplest way, but first, let's understand the powerful function of this tag.
Let’s first take a look at what Google says about canonical tags on its official page:
Canonical tags are very common in services that allow you to create a mobile version of your website. These services will add the canonical tag of the mobile version of the page to the original page to avoid duplicate content issues.
It is important that you have a basic understanding of this useful tag and how to use it in the content syndication process. Beyond that, I will not delve into the technical details of the rel=canonical tag.
Let’s look at an example of using the canonical tag in content syndication:
If you publish a great and useful article on “SEO on WordPress” on your blog and allow 3-4 niche blogs to syndicate that content on their blogs, you can make use of the canonical tag to tell the search engine bots that the article published on your blog is the original article and should be rated as the original article on that particular topic.
The canonical tag will also be added to other blogs that syndicate your original content.
Perhaps the best part is that all major search engines (Bing, Yahoo, Google) support the canonical meta tag.
We add a rel=canonical tag to the head of the non-canonical page or the page where the content is being syndicated.
Using the Canonical Tag for Content Syndication in WordPress:
By now, you’ve learned that the canonical tag’s attributes tell search engine bots which page hosts the original content, allowing you to avoid any duplicate content penalties.
Now, let’s explore how to add a canonical tag to your WordPress posts and when you should use this important tag. Let’s look at an example:
In addition to SidelinePlay, I have a number of other niche blogs that cover similar topics to the one on SidelinePlay. I write at least one or two great posts per month on those blogs, and I often want to share the same content on SidelinePlay.
Normally, I could just copy and paste the content from these blogs into the SidelinePlay blog and add a no index tag to avoid any duplicate content issues. This is a safe approach, but I would lose a lot of link juice. Considering this is a blog, and I know the content is great, I want these posts to gain the advantage of link juice.
Now that I know about the rel=canonical tag, what I can do is simply copy and paste epic content from other blogs in my network onto my ShoutMeLoud blog and add the rel=canonical tag on the SidelinePlay post to point to the original article on the other blog (and mark it as the original article).
You should always link back to the original article in the body of your syndicated content. For example: This article was originally published at (URL) and is shared here because it’s so awesome.
Another simple way to use rel=canonical in your content marketing is to allow others to repost content from your blog using the appropriate canonical tag. Likewise, you can post content from other blogs that allow content syndication and use the canonical tag. This way, your blog will always be updated with great content. (Don't forget to add comments like I suggested above.)
Keep in mind that this practice should be used in moderation and only for high-quality content. Overdoing this practice can increase your risk of duplicate content penalties, which is exactly what you want to avoid.
Now, let’s see how to add the Canonical tag to your WordPress blog posts. You can start with the standalone Canonical SEO WordPress plugin , which adds a checkbox in the post editor section for adding the Canonical URL. Click here to download it .
To do this, we’ll use the awesome free WordPress plugin SEO by Yoast . If you’re already using the SEO by Yoast plugin, click on the Advanced section of the Yoast plugin in your WordPress post editor, scroll down to Canonical URL, and add a link to the original content. (See screenshot below.)
The following is a comment from the official website webmaster blog about using rel=canonical for cross-domain:
Note the line "Canonical link elements are treated as hints rather than absolute directives", so allow me to repeat that:
- Use canonical tags in moderation. I recommend only using 1 per 20 posts.
- Include a link to the original post in the body of your syndicated content.
- Make sure the syndicated content fits your blog topic and is valuable.
- Here is a great article from the official Google blog about mistakes to avoid when using canonical tags.
Bonus Tips for Affiliate Marketers:
If you are doing affiliate marketing and posting monthly discount coupons like “Dreamhost Monthly Discount Coupons”, then in most cases you will be using almost the same content and creating a lot of duplicate content. You can utilize the rel=canonical tag to point the link to a specific page to avoid duplicate content penalties.
Even though the canonical tag is rarely discussed, it can be a very important part of your website’s SEO.
If you’ve used the rel=canonical tag in other ways, we’d love to hear about your experiences and results. Also, if you know of more creative uses for the canonical tag in WordPress blog SEO, let us know in the comments below.
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