Syndicating your article online – its pros and cons

Syndicate means organization or group or collective. Syndicating articles means collecting your published notes and making it accessible to the world.
Is it as simple as that? Well, almost.
What happens is that when you publish an article it is made immediately available to the public / surfers. Obviously, due to this there are many advantages and disadvantages.
Let us go through the advantages first.
1. Public awareness of your brand:
By making your article available to the mass you are actually advertising yourself, your company. You would have your articles published in many ‘news-related’ websites and also pass them on as newsletters. So for obvious reasons, you would include your name/representative name, your company name in the bylines of your articles. That way you get noticed. The benefit is – you and your company become well known. You become an authority to that subject (let us say “Marker Pen”). The more recommendations you get, the more you are regarded and you gain an automatic trust.
2. Attract visitors to your website:
When you syndicate an article, make sure you include your website URL. It’s not just the inclusion of URL that helps. You must make sure your article is really interesting. If they are interesting you will naturally have followers coming to your website to grab more information. If your article is sort of an advertisement – hopefully it won’t fool many a people.
3. Increase your PR (Page Rank) on Google:
If there are many links pointing to your website, it counts as a significant website for Google to increase the Page Rank. In simple terms it means if your article is syndicated by many websites, the number of links pointed to at your website increases. Of course a direct link with your byline (information) is imperative.

Disadvantages while syndicating your article
1. Obsolescence of information
Unless your article is of a static nature, that is, a topic which does not change, your article could easily be considered outdated. if the article you posted is of a volatile nature then a constant upgrade or follow-up on your article is necessary .

But there is a problem here as well. Consider a case your article is syndicated on a website. You have no control over the article now. How long the article will stay – only the website owner can tell.

And, due to some misfortune if your article is still there, whereas, the topic is well outdated; then your competitors / readers will underestimate your knowledge power. They may consider you (or your company) as one who does not update on the latest happenings.

2. Wrongful modification to the article
A very common thing that can happen once the article lands up in the hands of a webmaster that couldn’t care less. Explicit licensing notices won’t help.

a. You could find your links in the article being modified. Chances are that your links being replaced with their affiliate links. The very purpose of getting more visitors to your website and getting reciprocal links is defeated.
b. You can find your byline URL and useful company information being misplaced elsewhere or placed in some lesser important area.
c. Your article could be divided into ‘n’ pages with advertisement taking a bulk of space instead of your article.
d. You have 5 articles but have reserved rights to publish 3 of your articles. However, if a webmaster gets a chance to publish one article and somehow gets a hand on your other articles, they won’t bother to even read the Terms and Conditions. What they would do is go about publishing articles which they are not supposed to. Tricky eh?
How do you deal with such situation? Well, it’s really not an easy situation. You just cannot post and forget it. You need to continuously monitor the changes / updates on each and every article of yours and deal with such unscrupulous webmasters.

3. Income from Ads:
If your website has articles on the home page and also ads on them, obviously you earn from the articles placed on the website.

Imagine your article is syndicated, and then it looks like you worked for free and allowed somebody else to have a share of the revenue from the ads placed in the article.

There are some websites who write article to promote their website. Whether they promote their business or their website, such sites who write articles mainly to promote their business generally do not suffer.

4. Mirroring information:
What Google really does not appreciate is duplication of data. So, when your information is syndicated, it’s really a mirror of information of what you have on your website. Simply meant Google could consider your website to be mirror information of what it finds on the other websites, thereby having your website page rank dropped to zero.

I really don’t know if it could cause a drop in the Page Rank, but why take chances?

5. Spamming your information:
If you allow somebody to just re-publish your article in their newsletter, beware! You don’t know how or who he is. Chances are that he may spam your article through his newsletter. Very easy to be branded a spam website.

So, in short, if you are one who is into promoting business, a bit of syndication will do more good than harm. On the contrary, if your website is wholly into writing articles, its wiser to have them in the website, rather than have them syndicated.

Obsolescence – how to avoid it?

A small tip – though tedious, I think it’s the best way to avoid outdated info. You can have all your info written in JavaScript and update them. Since the pages are syndicated, obviously it has to retrieve the latest page.

Moreover you are also in control of your information. Here is a sample for you.

I have chosen a poem by William Blake called “The Little Lamb”. If you were to HTML this poem, it would be like this –

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Gave thee life, & bid thee feed
By the stream & o'er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

The same could be written as a JavaScript code as follows –

document.write (“

Little Lamb, who made thee?
”);
document.write (“Dost thou know who made thee?
”);
document.write (“Gave thee life, & bid thee feed
”);
document.write (“By the stream & o'er the mead;
”);
document.write (“Gave thee clothing of delight,
”);
document.write (“Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
”);
document.write (“Gave thee such a tender voice,
”);
document.write (“Making all the vales rejoice?
”);
document.write (“Little Lamb, who made thee?
”);
document.write (“Dost thou know who made thee?
”);

Let us assume that you have saved this document as blake.js, so others would simply include the lines as –


Advantage?
• You are the owner of your content. It pays at the end, even if you have to write lengthy JavaScript codes.
• Obviously, this saves your time from keeping a check on other websites modifying your content.


Disadvantages?
If you syndicate your articles to many websites and if there are thousands of visitors visiting them and viewing your article, then your server has to pay for the real high bandwidth for displaying your article on their system.
You cannot guarantee every webmaster to accept Javascript of your article. Moreover chances are that search engines do not consider (read index) Javascript pages for ranking.
If Javascript is disabled at the reader’s end then chances are your article won’t appear at all.
The imminent question would be – should I syndicate or not? Well, the choice is up to you. If you feel that you are benefiting from syndicating then why stop? Go syndicating! Let the world know who you are!