Repost content from your blog to other sites: to be or not to be?

You spent many hours, sometimes even days, writing a great blog post, formed a content marketing strategy ... The last thing you want is for nobody to see the result of your work, right?



What exactly do you do to be seen? You share your post through profiles on social networks, ask a few friends to advertise it, and then repost your message on other sites - Medium and LinkedIn, for example?

Attention, question: do you need to do all this?

Will the content repost worsen your search engine optimization or will it attract more traffic and provide sales (how to increase the number of reposts, we wrote here )?

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Reposts may impair your search engine optimization.

On the KISSmetrics site, it is allowed to repost posts from a blog to other resources. Similarly, they work through other resources: Entrepreneur.com and Search Engine Journal.



When the KISSmetrics team started doing this for the first time, an increase in referral traffic by about 9,492 visitors per month was noticed, while their search traffic remained fairly high quality. Then Google rolled out its new update to the Panda algorithm. See what has become of the traffic:







The result: a huge loss - 225418 visitors per month. To be more precise, 2,25418 visitors who use Google.



Ultimately, KISSmetrics coped with this problem, but their search traffic is not the same as it was before.



From this lesson it is clear: the repost of content on sites more reputable than yours (even if you first publish it on your blog and force you to leave a link to the source), may incur a penalty for duplicating content.



To correct this problem, sites such as Entrepreneur.com, duplicating content, pledge to use canonical URLs (rel = canonical).







If you are not familiar with this element, look at the image above. This is the source code from the site Entrepreneur.com.



As you can see, there is a line that says:







Using the code above, Entrepreneur.com tells Google that all rights to this content belong to KISSmetrics. In addition, thanks to the canonical link, this page on Entrepreneur.com is not listed in the results of a Google search query.



So, if you are going to repost your content, make sure that the site uses the rel = canonical element.

So how should you do repost?

As mentioned above, you should only publish content on sites that agree to use canonical links. Most major sites like Medium or LinkedIn do not give you complete control over the situation.



This means that when you re-publish your content on these sites, even if you leave a link to the original material, ultimately you will be “penalized”. In this case, you have several options:



1. Rewrite content - you can rewrite your post, and then publish it on these sites, so that the material is not considered duplicate.

2. Talk to the site owner - it’s okay to ask him or his editor to include a canonical link. KISSmetrics did this with Entrepreneur Magazine, and they happily agreed to add it, although for this they needed to work to improve the capabilities of their site.

3. Publish your content only on another site - sometimes it's better to publish your best posts on other people's sites, rather than on your own (for information on how to work with opinion leaders, follow the link). You will get publicity, you may make several sales, and the link to your site will be indicated in the message. In most cases, large sites want exclusivity, so you can’t use this content on your own blog or other people's blogs.



From a practical point of view, the second option is preferable. If it does not work, then lean toward the third ... Option # 1, of course, can be considered, but occasionally.



Whatever you do, keep in mind that having content that wanders the web without a canonical link is wrong. Of course, soon you will get more traffic, but ultimately Google will punish you.

Republish your content in other languages.

In addition to the fact that KISSmetrics allowed reputable sites to post posts from their blog, they tried to repost their posts in other countries. That is, allowed foreign sites to take content from Quick Sprout, translate it and re-publish.



This has been happening for many years, and so far no one has suffered from a single update of the notorious search algorithm. Most of these reposts, unlike recent ones, do not contain a canonical link.



Of course, this is not exactly 100% accurate, but judging by the experience of working with Quick Sprout, one can say that Google does not consider content in another language to be duplicated.



Perhaps this is because these posts are translated by people, not computers. And this means that their content will not exactly coincide with the original, so it will not be considered a copy-paste.



Try to let other people translate your content and publish it on their website. This will allow a completely new audience to discover your blog. Just make sure that the owners of these sites use the rel = canonical element in case Google changes its algorithm. Also useful will be material on the basic laws of localization of content .

Never repost only parts of your post.

Making a repost of the first paragraph of a post on your blog is normal. But when you use more, but not all the text, you are asking for trouble.







It seems there are no loopholes here. When content reposts were made on KISSmetrics on Entrepreneur.com, there was a penalty from search engines, although KISSmetrics had more unique content than on this site.



If KISSmetrics published the same content again, how did it become more unique? The secret is that their posts contained comments, while posts on Entrepreneur.com did not. This means that there was more unique content (generated by users) on the KISSmetrics website than on other ... however, this did not prevent Google from applying sanctions.



The search engine not only finds out if your content is a duplicate, it also automatically notifies you if it detects user-generated content on your site as spam.



That is why you should not joke with Google, especially when it comes to duplicate content or spam.

Conclusion

Repost your content will not allow you to generate more traffic than you have now.



KISSmetrics tested this concept with reputable sites that have more than 5 million visitors per month. Very rarely, when they manage to attract more than 1000 visitors for the repost.



If you plan to use this tactic, do it primarily for advertising. Consider any additional traffic that you receive as a bonus. And in any case, do not forget about the use of canonical links.



Are you going to repost? And allow duplicate your content?