If you have been on the Internet for a while, and especially if you have been doing Internet Marketing, I am very sure you have come across the terms “syndication” or “web syndication” before, even though you may really not understand what they are all about.

Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a web site is made available for other web sites to use. This could mean simply by licensing the content so that other people can use it; Generally though, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site, in order to provide other people with a summary of the web site’s recently added content (for example, the latest forum posts or news and announcements).

A large scale web syndication of content started only in 2001. Today, many different types of content are being syndicated on the Internet. Millions of online web publishers such as newspapers, commercial web sites and blogs now publish their latest news headlines, product offers or blog postings in a standard format news feed.

Syndication benefits both the web sites which are providing the information and the web sites which are displaying it. For the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to its pages, making it more attractive to users. For the transmitting site, syndication drives exposure across numerous online platforms. This exchange generates new traffic for the transmitting site — making syndication a free and easy form of advertisement.

The prevalence of web syndication is also of interest to Internet marketers, since web surfers are becoming increasingly wary of providing personal information for marketing materials (for example signing up for a newsletter) and expect the ability for them to subscribe to a feed instead.

Although the syndication format could be any thing transported over HTTP (such as HTML or JavaScript), it is more commonly done through XML.

The two main families of web syndication formats are RSS and Atom, which are also the most well-known formats available.

A lot of online publishers are taking advantage of web syndication to market and promote themselves online.