I am seeing various examples where a syndicated article on Yahoo was chosen as the canonical version of the article around the Nov. core update, and now ranks prominently for non-branded keywords associated to that article, with the original article not ranking at all.
In the example below, Yahoo has a canonical pointing to the source, which sort of worked for a while (see Ahrefs and GSC screenshots) but stopped working with the November Core Update.
Yahoo has also recently earned many top rankings for "best" keywords, whether through syndication (and Google choosing their syndicated article as canonical) OR because the syndicated version of articles penalized by Site Reputation Abuse still apparently get to rank in top positions. Yahoo does have its own original content, but I'd estimate this makes up something like half of their overall SEO visibility (again, just guessing based on what I see, I don't actually know).
It's almost impossible to see the impact this is also having on syndicated content in Discover, but looking at many of our clients over the years, the tradeoff is enormous. Yahoo often appears prominently in Discover with syndicated content, with the original source not getting a single click there. Many site owners using syndication have no idea this is happening.
Sort of ironic in light of these "Site Reputation Abuse" discussions, but maybe that's just me.
SEO
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