Should we syndicate content?

[Wayne76]

Hello Mozzers!

Our company (FindMyAccident) is an accident news site. The goal is to roll our reporting out to all 50 states; currently, we operate full-time in 7 states.

To date, the largest expenditure is our writing staff. We hire professional
journalists who work with police departments and other sources to develop written
content and video for our site. Our visitors also contribute stories and/or
tips that add to the content on our domain. In short, our content is original.

A site that often appears alongside us in the SERPs in the markets where we work full-time is accidentin.com. They are a site that only syndicates accident news and offers little original content. (They also allow users to submit their own accident stories, and the entries index quickly and are sometimes viewed by hundreds of people in the same day. What's perplexing is that these entires are isolated incidents that have little to no media value, yet they do extremely well.)

The link profile is virtually non-existent. There are approximately 6 linking domains.

I don't rest my bets with Quantcast figures, but accidentin does use their pixel sourcing and the figures indicate that they are receiving up to 80k visitors a day in some instances. Not too shabby for the Flying Dutchman of accident news sites.

I understand that it's common to see news sites syndicate from the AP, etc., and traffic accident news is not going to have a lot of competition (in most instances), but the real shocker is that accidentin will sometimes appear as the first or second result above the original sources. What the...!?

The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?

While looking at their model, I'm wondering if we're not silly to syndicate news in the states where we don't have actual staff? It would seem we could attract more traffic by setting up syndication in our vacant states.

Should the Panda updates have any effect on their site?

Thanks, gang....

Wayne

[William.Lau]

Hi Wayne!

I've always been considered syndication a no-no.

But if your competitor accidentin is ranking well, it could be a number of factors.

If they a syndicating and are always updated frequently, this could be a factor. Google loves freshness and freshness usually ranks better than actual content.

Lets say NYTimes reports something, it will take a 30+minutes for other publishing companies to report the same thing because they don't syndicate it, they rewrite it with same details or more details(investigative journalism). So if they are reporting it and accidentin is reporting it right away, this could be why it ranks well. Because they beat the others to it, and others might start using them as a source, which then would provide them a link to that page.

One other thing that could be a factor, it that the domain is partial match. The partial match definitely can help in ranking better with people searching for "accident in new york" "accident in california" etc.

Also things like social media can help boost a SERP of a site if they get enough shares or likes etc. Many factors can help them.

Sorry for the spam on text, I am on lunch and can't type too coherently. But IMO, the top suspects are the domain name and freshness of content.