About the author
Adele is Dark Horse’s Digital PR Manager, with over a decade of experience in SEO, Content, and Digital PR. She has secured placement for clients in a plethora of industries, on sites including the Daily Mail, House Beautiful and This Is Money.
In this article
- What are PR syndications?
- Do PR syndications matter?
- What is the SEO value of content syndications?
- Should syndicated coverage contribute to PR KPIs?
- How can you get more syndicated coverage?
- How to find and track PR syndications
- Summary
Do content syndications really carry any value…or are they just essentially duplicate content? It’s a question that’s plagued PRs, brands and site-owners ever since the Panda update.
Our vibe is that we don’t count article syndications in our Digital PR reporting…but we do value syndications for the other benefits they bring, like increased brand awareness, more reach and potential referrals and social shares.
Read on to get the low-down on PR syndications – why they exist, where they have, and why they shouldn’t be conflated with real, unique coverage.
What are PR syndications?
A PR syndication (also known as a content syndication, article syndication, or syndicated coverage) is when a news outlet or other website repurposes or republishes an article from another outlet, sharing it with its own audience for increased views and engagement.
For example, The Mirror might publish a news story, only for it to later appear on various other sites belonging to the same news network or company, such as Manchester Evening News, The Daily Record, Daily Express and more. Syndications are common across regional news outlets, as it enables them to share a story that has possible interest with their own, dedicated readership. Sites that regularly syndicate content from one another are known as syndication partners.
The benefit of syndication for news corps and outlets is pretty clear: it enables them to boost content output with less manpower, tapping into perhaps more niche audiences and maximizing views and engagement.
But they’re also majorly beneficial for PRs and brands too. With just one piece of coverage you’ve worked for, you can potentially end up with hundreds of others across highly authoritative and contextually relevant sites. This maximises the PR impact of your story massively.
Do PR syndications matter?
Why yes, yes they do.
That’s the short answer.
The long answer is content syndications matter because each one contains either a backlink or a brand mention for your brand, while pushing your story, data, or brand narrative out to a wider audience.
Each one of those is a potential signal to search engines and LLMs that your brand is credible, knowledgeable, and trustworthy, as well as reaching a larger set of eyes than it would with a single piece of coverage, and increasing the chance of social shares.
In addition, more brand mentions and backlinks bring other benefits too – like increasing the chance of referral traffic clicking through to your brand’s site, or leading to an increase in brand searches later down the line. Above all, we know since the 2024 Google leak that brand recognition is crucial for SERP (and now AI) visibility. So those extra brand mentions are certainly not to be sniffed at.
What is the SEO value of content syndication?
Over the years, there’s been a fierce debate over whether syndicated backlinks and coverage actually deliver SEO value, and if so, how much.
In fact, that debate is still raging on, and while there’s no definitive answer per se, we hope we can bring a little clarity to the situation.
The main worry has typically been that syndicated content is, for all intents and purposes, duplicated content, which Google frowns upon. Reason being that duplicate content was historically seen as a way to manipulate rankings in SERPs, and so Google eventually stopped giving it any weight – even going so far as to penalise any and all offending sites, even those that were the original source of the content.
BUT there was a way to protect against such penalisation…and that was the canonical tag. Still seen as best practice for all syndicated content today, this is placed into the source code of any syndicated articles, indicating to Google the original source of the content. This effectively says, “Hey, we’re not trying to manipulate anything…it’s just a cool story from X website that we wanted to share with our audience. We’re all friends here.”
This means that syndicated content could potentially even serve as a positive signal to search engines…telling them that your content was interesting and useful enough to be shared more across a broader network of sites to reach a larger audience.
Regarding the backlinks themselves, there’s substantial reason to believe that a link from a piece of syndicated content doesn’t carry as much weight as the link from the original. This is because, with the canonical tag in place, it’s clear that the link wasn’t uniquely earned…rather, it was effectively a byproduct of that news outlet repurposing the story from another source.
However, we believe the question isn’t whether backlinks from syndicated content carry any value…but rather, just how much. Even if they don’t carry the same value as a uniquely earned piece of coverage, they’re still a trust signal that your story was newsworthy enough to be republished, and that your brand is therefore a source of such newsworthiness. Go you.
Should syndicated coverage contribute to PR KPIs?
In terms of whether syndicated coverage should be factored into your DPR KPIs…we believe it all depends on your brand’s goals.
If your brand’s or client’s goals are purely to increase the number of backlinks from unique referring domains, then you probably don’t want to lean too much on article syndications when reporting on results. This is because while we know those syndicated pieces do carry value, the jury is out on whether they hold as much value as an original piece of coverage, and therefore, we can’t promise that each backlink from syndicated content is going to move the needle with regards to your backlink profile and therefore, your position in the SERPs.
But let’s be real – this is Digital PR we’re talking about here. We know it’s about so much more than just backlinks and referring domains. Real brand visibility online is also about unlinked brand mentions, potential referral traffic, social shares, sets of eyes on your content and possible brand searches.
To build brand awareness, recognition and trust, you’ve got to be out there on the right sites, in front of the right readership, within the right contexts. And that goes regardless of whether it’s syndicated content or not.
How can you get more syndicated coverage?
So, now that we agree that syndicated coverage is still important (even if it can’t always be factored into your KPIs), how do we go about getting more of this lovely stuff?
It’s definitely possible to have a content syndication strategy that will maximise visibility of your brand’s story and ensure any coverage you work for, goes on to work harder for you.
Content syndication websites
Part of this strategy can be targeting news outlets and sites which we know are regularly syndicated from by other syndication partners. In a 2023 Buzzsumo analysis of syndicated content, they found the media networks most likely to syndicate your content to multiple sites within their own network are:
- Comcast
- Penske Media
- DMGT
- BBC
- Reach Plc
Granted, which media networks you target will largely depend on the country and locality your story is relevant to, as well as the industry/sectors you’re targeting. But it’s a good starting point to think about when compiling media lists or, ideally, at the ideation stage when you’re crafting the initial story ideas.
Backlink engagements
There are also some media networks and families who may share, circulate or reference stories from each other. For example, the same Buzzsumo study found that DMGT and Reach Plc regularly reference content from News Corp, the owner of outlets like Talksport, Times Radio and dozens of radio station sites in the UK and Ireland. Similarly, Comcast outlets are regularly referenced by sites like Business Insider and Politico.
While these aren’t the same as syndications, it’s certainly worth doing a bit of research on your ideal media targets and, besides targeting them directly, look at which news partners they may regularly reference in their stories, including those in your outreach strategy.
Content syndication services
Another way to increase the chances of your story being syndicated is to pitch to publishers who are regularly syndicated by news aggregators. News aggregators are sites who either post a mix of their own content and third-party content, or rely wholly on the latter. They include outlets like MSN, Yahoo, Newsbreak, Huffington Post and even Reddit.
Of course, there’s also the good ol’ fashioned newswires, which still have a role to play in today’s modern PRscape. These can be both free and paid, and will push out your story to a wide range of publications who republish or repurpose that content.
(It’s worth noting however that paid newswires will typically have the most capacity for the best reach and deliver to more authoritative, trusted sites, so this is very much often a ‘pay-to-play’ model).
How to find & track PR syndications
Securing a bunch of article syndications is always an awesome feeling. But how do you ensure you’re tracking down and locating these extraneous pieces of coverage?
There’s always paid-for media monitoring tools, which ‘listen’ for mentions of your brand across the web and will flag any social media mentions or pieces of media coverage. You can also have free alerts set up with Talkwalker or Google Alerts.
If searching manually for coverage, be sure to search both Google and Bing News for brand names, headlines/subject lines and even names of experts included in your story.
You can also use the handy canonical tag that should be present in every piece of syndicated content, to find said content. To do this:
1. When on any piece of coverage, simply right-click and click ‘View page source’
2. Within the source code, do ctrl+F/cmd+F “canonical”. If there is one, it will show you the canonical URL (i.e. the original source of the story).
3. If the canonical URL is different to the article you’re on, it means the article you’re on is a syndication, and therefore there might be others.
Remember – any content syndication should always have a canonical tag within the source code pointing to the content’s original source (i.e. who published it first). This ensures that any syndications won’t be viewed by search engines as duplicate content. If you find one is missing, it’s perfectly fine to reach out to the journalist and ask them to put one in – just like you would reach out for a link to be added if there wasn’t one (don’t ask, don’t get, right?).
Here at Dark Horse, we use our proprietary Syndication Checker tool to find and log any and all content syndications that might otherwise pass us by in manual searches. The tool scans related news networks on our behalf and flags any syndications we might have missed, ensuring no stone goes unturned when it comes to results for our clients.
To sum up…
We think content syndications are pretty good around here. Even though there’s mixed evidence to show their direct impact on SEO, we know they have a longer-term benefit for both brand awareness and SEO thanks to their ability to increase reach, referral traffic, visibility on socials and possibly even brand searches later on.
That being said, beware of mediocre agencies that might use syndicated coverage to inflate their reporting figures artificially. Always ask for a breakdown of the different coverage types so you can get a real picture of how your PR campaign has performed, in terms of unique coverage, new referring domains, links, and overall reach.
We avoid relying on syndicated coverage to measure our own performance – instead, unique coverage is always going to be our main goal. This ensures that we’re diversifying our clients’ pool of referring domains, ensuring any backlinks we secure are delivering the most impact they can.
Any syndications on top of that, are just a nice bonus.
