★Does syndication of a news features from high Profile site like TechCrunch have a negative SEO impact?

[LiamPatterson]

As a co-founder of a startup that is weekly featured on high page rank news sites such as TechCrunch, The Next Web, TreeHugger , Yahoo News etc.

These types of write ups are "SEO Gold" as they are high page rank sites with high relevancy to our sector and with unique good quality anchor text and copy.

However... Within hours of each post going live the content and links are syndicated either via RSS or scraped and appear as duplicate content on in some cases 100's of very low quality and low relevancy content aggregation sites.

To give you an example here are just two of the sites that are now appearing as linking domains due to this syndicated content and the links included in the article.

Examples :

Eco Market, The “Etsy For Eco,” Rebrands, Revamps, Raises & Prepares A U.S. Launch

Sarah Perez | Technology | Page 4

The above are just a couple of examples amongst 100's that result from each feature.

I would like to hear you opinion on if these links would be considered natural and you feel I should not take action or if you think these need removing by contacting the webmasters or disavowing the links?

I am sure I cant be alone in having this problem and look forward to hearing you advice and tips

[PaddyDisplays]

My understanding is that google will " pick up"  the story/text from the original place when it crawls it (bigger sites get crawled more often), so it gets the credit.  In that case the only problem is when a big site copies a story from a smaller site before google has crawled it.

But your worrying that all theses back links will look spammy.  Story syndication or data scrapping is so common and been happening for so long, it would have been a big problem by now, but its not (not to my knowledge).  I think google can easily spot a syndicated or scrapped story from a legit source and knows not to mark the backlink it as spammy, but I don't think you would get much juice from the syndicated links (especially if they are junk site).

I know of sites were they do the same as you (get picked up by big news sites), and it all gravy baby

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, it can be murky and very situational. Optimistically, I tend to agree with @Paddy - this should be a good thing, and you're not doing anything wrong. I'd hate to see you shoot yourself in the foot by cutting these links or harming your core business.

Practically, though, I have seen situations where the duplicates started to cause problems or the scrapers or partner began to outrank the source (you, in this case). There's no easy answer, I'm afraid, other than diversification. If you can build a solid link profile beyond these links, have solid social signals, and generally appear to be a brand in and of yourself, then duplicates and other issues will have less impact. If you base everything on these links, you could start to run into trouble.

I'd be hesitant to tell you to cut valuable ties and relationships. For the most part, these links are positive. I'd just make sure that you've got eggs in other baskets.