Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it okay to post my blog posts to both an internal blog on our domain and an external blog?
-
We have a blog internally at kay-grant.com/blog and also created an external blog at ActiveRain.com
Is it okay to post the same blog posts to both sites or should I have different content for each blog?
-
The only safe move here is to create amazing content for both blogs - but why have 2 blogs? Why double your effort when you could be using all the content to prop up the main site?
Andy makes a very good point here. If you have a good article about Brass Widgets on your website and you decide that you want to write a second Brass Widgets article to publish on another website, then you are going to publish a second article that will compete with you and take some of your traffic.
Even if the articles are slightly different or very different they will still be "competing" - either at the short tail keyword level or the long tail keyword level. The result will be damaging to your traffic. The amount of damage will be proportional to the strength difference of your domains and the diversity of keywords in the articles. If the second domain is a lot more powerful than your own domain you could lose almost all of your traffic to the second website.
I have a website that publishes only unique articles. Some of those articles have been written by other people in my industry who have similar articles or entire websites about the topics that they gave me to publish. I never asked any of these people to write an article for my website. Every one of them came to me with an offer. With content written by these other authors, my website frequently outranks their website for primary and secondary keyword of the industry. They might have a website that is powerful for the topic, but I have a website that is authoritative in the industry. It can be hard to predict who will win at different levels but my site now competes and brings in lots of traffic for topic areas where I have never written.
Publishing on your own site, as Andy suggests, builds the strength of your site and does not invite potentially strong competitors into your keyword space. There are benefits of sharing articles. You get exposure as an "expert" on another website, which might have amazing traffic that includes visitors who will seek you out to do business. You can often get a link on those websites that will send lots of traffic to your website. The best situation for all is if you simply want to get your message out to as many people as possible, but if there are competitive concerns then you must weigh the value of a link with the value of the exposure and the risk of a very strong competitor moving permanently into your space.
-
That's the wrong way to try and gain backlinks Geoff. You want to build links to your main site, but you want to be creating something in one place that is going to benefit you. An external site that then links back to you from duplicated content wont do it for you.
Good linkbuilding takes time, and it starts with your content - write something that is better than others have and take to social media to promote it.
I could honestly write a book about link building - it is that involved, but start by perfecting content that others will want to share and link to.
-Andy
-
I publish blogs on my company's blog and sometimes I will take that same topic and expand on a few key points that were previously discussed. Andy is correct though you need to create unique content especially if you want to use the blog to obtain backlinks.
Next time you write a blog try to take a topic you covered and go further in depth and see what new information you can come up with instead of duplicating the content.
Hope that helps some.
-
This is indexed by search engines. When I say internal I just mean hosted on the domain.
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the response! My thought behind this is to develop backlinks.
-
Hi Geoff,
This isn't best practice at all. You don't want to have two or more copies of anything anywhere.
I don't even think that re-purposing any of the articles would be a good move.
Imagine that you are Google - if you see the same article in more than 2 places, what do you do? Penalise one site? Realise that both sites are owned by you and punish both sites? Don't show either article in a good position?
The only safe move here is to create amazing content for both blogs - but why have 2 blogs? Why double your effort when you could be using all the content to prop up the main site?
-Andy
-
Unique content would be preferred. Is the internal blog being indexed within search engines or is it just for employees?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal Linking - Post links vs Side Bar Links behaving differently
Hi, I have a question regarding the internal linking behavior. My website is www.hindimeaning.com which is approx 3 years old. I have approx 450 posts. Now i have a widget on right sidebar "Popular posts". A widget below my posts "Related Posts". And a simple html CSS menu above the posts (I removed menu around 6 month before so currently it will not show.) I crawled my site with moz crawler (same are the result from google crawler as well) and it shows menus links as internal links. While sidebar widget "Popular posts" and "Related Posts" are not showing as internal links. If we talk theoretically what i learn till now is "every link on a page behaves as internal link". Then why the widget links are not showing as internal links. Thanks, Mahesh Kumar
Link Building | | chaudhary04890 -
Guest Posting
Is guest posting to get links a good idea? I have the blogs to post but do not have the time to find, approach and build a relationship with bloggers to get the guest posts. Are guest posting services a good idea and if so can anyone recommend one? Thanks
Link Building | | Studio330 -
Forum posting
I would like to ask i have found on blog: "Forum posting is an important effective SEO Link Building Method to getting quality traffic and quality back links to your website. Learn here about forum posting basics, advices and guidelines." Is it true? Forum posting with backlink to my website can help me to rank better? I mean posting on the related forum website?
Link Building | | joekoo10 -
Is there a tool to keep track of internal links?
I am looking for a tool that will help me keep track of internal links. We are working on a website that has roughly 500 pages of unique content. We are at a point where we plan to go through all of those pages and look for natural, internal link building opportunities (as well as pages that may have too many "over optimized" links). It would be really helpful to know the following for each page: 1. URL (we can extract this)
Link Building | | BlueTraffic
2. Meta Title (we can extract this)
3. Target Keywords (we can manually enter these) 4. Internal Links To Other Pages - A field (or fields) where we could manually enter the URL of each page that this page links to (including the anchor text used) Once all of this data is entered, it would be great if this tool could also count how many incoming links each page has (from other pages on the site) or somehow show which pages link to it. This would help to identify pages that have zero internal links. Do you know if a tool like this already exists, or even a spreadsheet with some functionality like this already built in? Thanks,
JC0 -
Unique Domains vs. Total Links?
At what point is there diminishing returns from getting multiple links from one website? Edit: To clarify, when doing competitor research I come across lots of sites that have say 500 linking domains with 5000 total links. When setting goals and calculating the types of links I should go after, I'm not certain which number is the one actually helping the site to rank.
Link Building | | ErikDster0 -
Too many links in my blog post created by comments. Should I worry?
Every year, we do a popular "Favourite pictures of the year" contest where people vote on the best picture (i.e: their mate's) in order to win something. But I just found that I'm going way over the "Too many links" limit and I think it's because of all the comments. 1. Is it a problem 2. Is there a way to de-activate the links? Thank you! 🙂 Ioan
Link Building | | IoanSaid0 -
Dofollow Blog Comments
I wanna buy dofollow comments, can be there any negative effects? I understand that is a kind of a black hat seo, but i saw many sites who used this type of service and get boosted in the search engine ranking.
Link Building | | Alexsmenaru0 -
Can link juice be passed in an iframe from domain A to domain B
Need to give our web partners our booking form which must be loaded in an iframe calling back to our domain. Is it possible to pass any link juice from their domain loading our iframe back to us. Was thinking of a "Powered by" text link in the form footer, but I'm guessing the link needs to be outside the iframe. Would love to hear any thoughts or workarounds on this.
Link Building | | apolloseo1