Difference between Syndication, Autoblogging, and Article Marketing

[summitseo]

Rands slide deck titled 10 Steps to Effective SEO & Rankings from InfusionCon2011 on slide 82 recommends content syndication as a method for building traffic and links.  How is this any different than article marketing?  He gave an example of this using a screenshot of this search result for "headsmacking tip discussion."

All of those sites that have republished SEOmoz's content are essentially autoblogs that post ONLY content generated by other people for the purpose of generating ad clicks from their organic traffic.  We know that Google has clearly taken a position against these types of sites that offer no value.  We hear Matt Cutts say to stay away from article marketing because you're just creating lots of duplicate content.

Seems to me that "syndication" is just another form of article marketing that spreads duplicate content throughout the web.  Can someone help me understand the difference?

By the way, the most interesting one I saw in those results was the syndicated article on businessweek.com!.

[DanDeceuster]

This is a very excellent question, hopefully my answer makes sense for you.

Syndication would be one of two things, either submitting your RSS feed to RSS feed directories or getting your content posted on other websites. Either can help as they will undoubtedly link to the original source, giving you links.

Autoblogging is when a scraper or bot simply copies your content and reposts it automatically after you have published it. This usually links back to you as well.

Article marketing is submitting unique content, not existing content, to an article bank. They publish the resource and you include a link back to you in there.

Given Google's actions lately, I would say the trust metrics passed through these links is quite small. However, pagerank still passes and you can get pretty good anchor text, so it's never a bad thing.

On a side note, sites like articlesbase.com use canonical tags, so even though their content might be duplicated elsewhere, Google knows where the original is. That original passes link juice, the duplicates, not so much.

All of these are ways to get links back to your site, but I don't think any of them is particularly effective. But it's good to have a variety of links, so having backlinks like this, while they may not be very valuable, is good in the overall SEO picture.

[summitseo]

Yes, I know how each one of those methods work.  What I was getting at was the fact that the links are all essentially the same in that they are generally on low quality pages and the end result is proliferating duplicate content throughout the web.  The Autoblogging tools I'm familiar with utilize RSS feeds or other data feeds (that someone else has "syndicated") to publish content.

I suppose syndicating content would be effective if you're content is great and you are a well known blogger, like Rand!