Does it hurt your site to syndicate content on other sites?

[nicole.healthline]

Does publishing an article from your site on other sites hurt your site if you require a link back to your site?

If website B, C, and D publish an article found site A, but they link back to site A, does that hurt or help site A?

[RyanKent]

If you offer a quality article to other quality sites who properly tag the article, it can be quite beneficial to your site. There's a few carefully chosen words in that statement so I'll offer some clarification.

Quality article: If you offer some helpful, informative "best on the web" type of content then share the article on other sites, you are exposing yourself and your site to an audience that may otherwise have never known about your site. I would make sure you already have solid content on similar topics so when your article attracts traffic, you can keep them interested in your site. If you write an article on the health benefits of Vitamin A, then a "related articles" area that talks about other vitamins or health issues which vitamin A addresses would be great.

Quality sites: If you share your article with sites that already have established audiences, then your article will be exposed to new viewers. Anything from social media sites like Reddit, to topic sites like Glamour magazine, or PC Magazine can be helpful. What you want to be careful about is sharing the article with sites that do not have established articles. In that case the benefit is minimal and the published article on the other site can wind up competing with yours in SERPs for traffic.

Proper tagging: The article should either use a canonical tag to identify your site as the source, or the new meta tagging such as rel=author. It should be clear that your site is the original source of the article.

[iroko]

From one side, it's a common way of getting links. By the other hand it's a complex issue of Google determinig the original source and even with the result on your favor, it could be a matter of domain/page authority on SERPs results. Ths issue is quite similar to the "I rank worse than my scrapers" effect. There is a somehow historical debate on WebmasterWorld from 2003: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum44/522.htm And a more recent one, almost with the same discussion about ranking lower than the scrapers, WMW, 2010: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4182363.htm It may seem that Panda could had solve this issue, but in fact it got worst. There is a very good SEOmoz post about content syndication, scrapers and loosing traffic and SERP position after Panda: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/postpanda-your-original-content-is-being-outranked-by-scrapers-amp-partners Suggestions: If you can ask for a link back... Can you ask for a rel canonical? Implement proper metadata (schema.org) inside your content that points to you on the syndicated content. Use social signals to promote your content just after published by you and before getting to syndicated site (or scrapers). Experiment, Analyze, and decide after that.

[seoug_2005]

Does quallity sites includes "article directories" ?  Not any article directory, but 5-10 article directories.

[RyanKent]

You would determine the quality of a site based on all the normal factors. If you have a URL to share I would be happy to take a look and share an opinion on it's quality.