Syndicated Content and SEO

[eville84]

Hi all,

I am in the early stages of starting a service that will syndicate content to webmasters.

I'm looking for a method that will let webmasters easily aggregate this content. At the same time the content will have to be SEO friendly.

3 options that i have looked at:

JavaScript - I'm unsure if SE bots can read this content.

Iframe - From my research SE bots will not index the page the iframe is being displayed on. Bots will index the page that the iframe is sitting on, which isn't useful.

XSLT - is great for SEO because html will be rendered server side. The problem is that webmasters would have to install an app on their server which would perform the XML transformation. This makes things too complicated because a lot of webmasters wont bother using this service if they have to go to the trouble of installing a web app.

Is JS my best route? I do know that SE bots are getting better at reading content from javascript because of new Ajax style sits.

Anyone's insight or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Durham_e]

Presumably you are keen that the syndicated content be accessible to the search engine bots.

OK

On the other hand maybe from a SEO perspective you could have a duplicate content problem.

When I think of SEO aspects of sydicated content I tend to think of the latter.

[eville84]

Presumably you are keen that the syndicated content be accessible to the search engine bots.

It can be accessible if it is processed server side with a transformation language such as XSLT. What I am really look for is a method of syndication that can be accessible with a client side method such as javascript. This will just make the service so much easier for the user. Ideally it would be as easy as adsense is for webmasters to place ads on a site, except in this case, content.

On the other hand maybe from a SEO perspective you could have a duplicate content problem.

This will not be an issue as the content will not be sitting on a site other than the one it is being syndicated to. I know that sounds strange but it will without understanding the business model.

Picture this:
content entry service --> syndication process --> webmasters site

[Durham_e]

Interesting Project.

Sounds sort of like a banner delivery system. Maybe the various method of delivery say in Openads and experience of multi site deployment would be useful to take a look at.

[eville84]

openads is something that i have looked at. There are some aspects that go on with the back end technology that I would like to dig into further but generally their process is much too complicated. I’m looking to make this extremely simple for the end user.