Search Engine Marketing Articles

Content Exchanges

You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

Writing good content for your site is hard enough. In some cases you also have to also offer a number of opinions and arguments. Variety is one of the main facets of good content - not variety of subject area though - variety of viewpoint, opinion, writing style and arguments.

This article will look at the benefits of exchanging your content with other sites and highlight some of the potential problems.

Why would you exchange content?

You cannot be everything to everyone. There is a limit to what you and your content's contributors know and can write about.

By exchanging content with other sites, you can increase the exposure that your work and therefore site is getting, and offer additional information for your users.

You may say, "well, what about the traffic I would loose?".

It's not about the traffic.

People leaving through a link on your site probably would not have bought anything anyway. They left because they could not find what they wanted on your site (although this could be a navigation issue).

By offering the best possible service to your users, you are increasing the likelihood that they will remember your site and return.

Even if they leave today and find something they want elsewhere, they will remember how they found that information (ie through your site).

Benefits of exchanging content

• It can be the first step or part of developing a working relationship with a site related to yours.
• It adds new perspective and information to your site which benefits your users.
• Your articles or content will give your brand some exposure on other sites.
• Any traffic that comes to your site through links in your content will be pre-qualified.
• Any link back to your site will have the anchor text that you dictate (good for search engine optimisation).

Potential pitfalls of exchanging content

• You can't control the quality and integrity of others sites. A bad move by someone running a site that hosts content of yours could have a negative impact on your brand.
• If done to excess (ie several sites using all of your content) then you could face duplicate content penalties from the search engines.
• Like content feeds, exchanged content should only form a small part of your site. Your site should be the majority of your own work.

Main points to consider

At the end of the day, if you are being offered a piece of content for your site, you need to judge it based on its information value to your users.

Forget about how much traffic will leave your site (it will be negligible). Is it good content and will your users benefit from it?

If you are considering contributing your content to another site, think about you will gain from it.

Are the users of that site likely to be interested in what you have to offer? Will the site give you a link back to your site? Will they allow you to add a bio to the article? Will the image of the site reflect badly on your brand?

And again - your site should be mainly original work. Added content, adds value - it doesn't create it.

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