Syndicate Without Losing The Original

The failure is specific: the copy sits on a stronger domain, Google picks it as the canonical version, and the traffic goes to a site you do not control and cannot change. The obvious protection, a cross-domain rel=canonical, is a hint rather than a directive, and several of the platforms people syndicate to strip it or never emitted it. Whether syndication is worth doing at all is genuinely disputed - some teams get durable reach from it, others have watched a partner copy take a query permanently - so the decision is per piece, not a policy.

The skill file

---
name: syndication-without-losing-the-original
description: Use when republishing an article on Medium, LinkedIn articles, Substack, dev.to or a partner site and the original needs to stay the version that ranks.
---

# Syndicate Without Losing The Original

The failure is specific: the copy sits on a stronger domain, Google picks it as the canonical version, and the traffic goes to a site you do not control and cannot change. The obvious protection, a cross-domain rel=canonical, is a hint rather than a directive, and several of the platforms people syndicate to strip it or never emitted it. Whether syndication is worth doing at all is genuinely disputed - some teams get durable reach from it, others have watched a partner copy take a query permanently - so the decision is per piece, not a policy.

## What you need first

- the original article, published, indexed and holding at least one query you care about
- the platforms you plan to syndicate to and what each supports: cross-domain canonical, noindex, or nothing
- the current position of the original for its main query, recorded before any copy exists

## Method

1. Decide what the copy is for before you write it: reach on that platform, or traffic back to you. If reach, syndicate the whole piece and point the canonical home. If traffic, publish an extract and leave the payoff on your page.
2. Confirm the original is indexed and ranking before any copy exists anywhere. Publishing both the same day lets a stronger domain get crawled first and become the version treated as the source.
3. Check what each platform actually emits rather than what its help page claims: view source on someone else's post and look for a rel=canonical pointing off-platform. Medium and dev.to support it, most newsletter platforms and LinkedIn articles do not, and that difference decides the method.
4. Where cross-domain canonical is unavailable, either syndicate a shortened version under a different title or delay by two to four weeks, so the original has crawl history to defend itself with.
5. Change the title and the opening paragraph on the copy even when the canonical is in place, because identical titles compete in the same result set and the deduplication choice is Google's, not yours.
6. Put an explicit originally-published-at line with a link near the top. It is the strongest provenance signal a human sees and the only one that survives a stripped canonical.
7. Re-check the original's position for its main query 30 days later against the number you recorded. If the copy outranks you, ask for removal or noindex rather than waiting for it to resolve on its own.

## What this produces

A per-platform syndication rule with canonical support recorded, plus a 30-day position check on the original.

## Where this goes wrong

- treating cross-domain rel=canonical as binding, when a much stronger domain carrying the same text can still be chosen over you
- syndicating on publication day, before the original has any history
- syndicating the whole archive by default, so your body of work exists in full on domains you cannot edit

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/syndication-without-losing-the-original

What you need first

• the original article, published, indexed and holding at least one query you care about
• the platforms you plan to syndicate to and what each supports: cross-domain canonical, noindex, or nothing
• the current position of the original for its main query, recorded before any copy exists

Method

1. 01 Decide what the copy is for before you write it: reach on that platform, or traffic back to you. If reach, syndicate the whole piece and point the canonical home. If traffic, publish an extract and leave the payoff on your page.
2. 02 Confirm the original is indexed and ranking before any copy exists anywhere. Publishing both the same day lets a stronger domain get crawled first and become the version treated as the source.
3. 03 Check what each platform actually emits rather than what its help page claims: view source on someone else's post and look for a rel=canonical pointing off-platform. Medium and dev.to support it, most newsletter platforms and LinkedIn articles do not, and that difference decides the method.
4. 04 Where cross-domain canonical is unavailable, either syndicate a shortened version under a different title or delay by two to four weeks, so the original has crawl history to defend itself with.
5. 05 Change the title and the opening paragraph on the copy even when the canonical is in place, because identical titles compete in the same result set and the deduplication choice is Google's, not yours.
6. 06 Put an explicit originally-published-at line with a link near the top. It is the strongest provenance signal a human sees and the only one that survives a stripped canonical.
7. 07 Re-check the original's position for its main query 30 days later against the number you recorded. If the copy outranks you, ask for removal or noindex rather than waiting for it to resolve on its own.

What this produces

A per-platform syndication rule with canonical support recorded, plus a 30-day position check on the original.

Where this goes wrong

• treating cross-domain rel=canonical as binding, when a much stronger domain carrying the same text can still be chosen over you
• syndicating on publication day, before the original has any history
• syndicating the whole archive by default, so your body of work exists in full on domains you cannot edit

Use this skill in your own AI

The download is a plain markdown file with the name and trigger in its frontmatter. Where an assistant supports skills it can load itself, that frontmatter is what it reads to decide this one applies.

Questions about this skill

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