Content syndication is one of the oldest tricks in the book for link building and is still one of my personal favorites. Why? Because the idea and process is very simple. You simply write articles that contain links to your site(s) and then distribute them to directories that syndicate the content out to other sites.
There are many article directories available to accept your content. Just search for “article directories” and you will find the most prominant ones. My favorite is www.ezinearticles.com but there are many good ones.
Submitting the same article out to many directories isn’t as effective as it once was however… especially with Google. This is because of Google’s duplicate content (a.k.a. boilerplate) filter. You see, Google doesn’t want to display the same content more than once under any given search phrase so it filters out duplicate content.
Google appears to determine which content was the original and then places all duplicates into its “supplemental index” or backup index which means the links in those won’t mean as much to your web site. So make sure your new articles are indexed under the most beneficial domain before submitting the same article to other locations so that Google will atribute the content to the correct domain.
I personally don’t think duplicate content filters are a big concern because any targeted incoming link is better than no link at all and you can always rewrite the same article a little mutliple times before posting. Besides, there are many opinions as to the actual value of links steming from Googles supplemental index and there are a few 
other search engines out there other than Google.
Another tactic I have found useful I learned is after submitting content monitor what sites actually use your content using Google Alerts and CopyScape and then contact those sites directly about publishing future articles. You can sometimes quickly build a list of your own content distribution channels in a niche so that when you do have fresh content you send it straight to your distribution list bypassing the article directories completely.
Another great place to syndicate content with links is in the form of an online press release. A well written and timely press release can be spread quickly which will build many incoming links which won’t trigger Google’s SPAM czars (those who look out for and punish spammers). Why? Because press releases are designed for news worthy content and breaking news, often distributed in the form of a press release, naturally travels quickly.
How to articles are also a popular content type online these days. Why? Most people go online to solve a problem making how to information a target. Solve a problem in any niche and you will be rewarded with traffic. Because of this there are many places as where you can answer people’s questions online on very popular domains including a link back to your site(s) in either the article itself or in your signature file. (e.g. LinkedIn, Yahoo Answers, About.com, etc.)
Finally there’s blogging. Blog networks and RSS feeds have made syndicating content even easier. The more blogs out there the more places that need your content and with RSS feeds setup to automatically pull related content to a network of blogs it’s much faster than article networks. However some respected article directories will get your article ranked highly quickly and even keep them there as where often blog posts can be somewhat short-lived because of the frequency of updates.
So, content syndication, although an old link building tactic, still has its place and will be effective as long as search engines weight a site’s authority at least in part by the number of relative incoming structured links. With a little creativity and by doing things a little bit different than everyone else can be very advantageous in you SEO efforts.
Much more to come on this topic…
