Reposting my articles on other blogs - good or bad?
-
Hi there!
Our blog is full of really good articles on consumer finance topics. Recently we established contact with some local media and even government agencies who said they will be happy to repost our articles on their sites.
Question: is it ok to repost our articles as they are and link back to us, or shall we rewrite them to make them 100% original?
The media doesn't insist on original content, but I'd like to get SEO benefit from it (the sites are really good). If original content gives us more SEO value, we're happy to do it
Please advise.
P.S. Using rel=canonicals is not an option (it's government websites and some old school media - they are very not tech savvy).
-
Hi Tom,
I wonder if I might question you on this point you raised:
"If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site."
Is content syndication therefore an absolute no-no these days? I'm aware of many of the best practices for syndicating content such as getting the content partner to specify the originator as canonical version or getting a link back to your original version in order that your article is not usurped in SERPs, but is it really the case that syndicated content with dofollow links to our own site would lead to some sort of penalty?
Our quality content is used by many sites (quite often sites with high authority) and these sites will link back to us. Are you suggesting this could lead to some sort of penalty or even a site-wide penalty?
Thanks in advance.
-
I agree with the others. 'Remarketing' is the way to go. If you have a loose idea, try and think of the multiple routes you could go down, or what different examples you could use to make a point.
I'd suggest reviewing old content. It's probably out of date anyway, so it's a perfect excuse to make it relevant oncemore and use hand it over to a another website you use.
If there is an opportunity to relate your content to what's going on in the news (i.e. up to the minute relevancy), it's good for indexing, sharing and hits.
-
Generally, I'd say as original as you can make it.
But I'd definitely take on Doug's advice as well and see if you can incorporate your content into an article that directly serves each blog. If you can accommodate it to their target audience, that would be fantastic.
Invariably, I often find it easier to write something completely new rather than rewrite something multiple times, so I think if you can take the general meat of your content and serve it specifically for each blog, I think you're going to see more than just SEO strength, but genuine, positive user engagement and probably traffic.
-
Thanks for your suggestions, Tom!
I suspected Google might not like it, but didn't think it was that serious.
To what extent do you think we should rewrite our original articles? Is tweaking couple paragraphs enough, or should it be a complete 100% rewrite?
-
I'd echo Tom's response. Allowing your content to reported does expose you to risk.
Chances are these outlets have much stronger sites. How much traffic is landing on your blog articles? Is there a likelihood that you might start competing against your own content in the SERPS?
I would look at the the publications concerned and try to understand what matters to their readership, what kind of demographic do they have and then rewrite you articles (or create new content) specifically targeted to their audience.
If you've got a nice library of old blog posts then it might be worth creating an ebook of the very best content and using that as a link building or lean-gen asset.
-
Hi there
It will take a bit more time, but rewriting the content to be unique would be so, so worth it.
If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site. It won't think that you're offering as much worth to the other blog and subsequent referrals if you're regurgitating what has been said.
Now, the obvious exception to this rule are Press Releases through sites like PRWeb. This is a well-known anomaly in the industry (some say it passes juice, Matt Cutts tries to say it doesn't), but it's so far down the line now that it seems unlikely that Google is going to penalise your site for it. The worse that would happen would be not passing any SEO value.
It is not safe to assume that this would be the case for sending your articles to these other blogs - it may very well penalise you.
By rewriting the content, you negate any risk of this and also ensure that the uniqueness will most likely pass the SEO benefits from the separate blogs.
To me, it's a matter of risk management, and all signs seem to point towards rewriting the content. It's a bit of an annoyance, but a small price to pay considering the benefits. It's also a great compliment to what you've written before, which has obviously proven to be very valuable, so congratulations on that!
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
-
Linking to the same sites from more than one of my sites, is this bad?
If I work for a company that has more than one website within the same industry and we have separate websites within that industry. An example would be: CarLoans.com HomeLoans.com & PersonalLoans.com The only difference from this example is that we are a B2B Company. My question is: is it bad to acquire links from the same external websites for multiple websites that we own and want to rank for? If I establish a relationship with Forbes or some other website and I can get links to several of our sites, will it ever be bad to link to all of our websites from this one website. I am asking not just for high domain authority website like Forbes, but also for websites that may have a DA in the 30's 40's and 50's as well. Thank you
Link Building | | fersu0 -
Subdomains, blogs and redirects, oh my!
Hello! We are currently hosting our blog on Medium which I would like to move away from. The options now are to host the blog with our custom CMS or use the HubSpot blog capabilities. I know their blog has built-in SEO best practices but I'm pretty sure it hosts the blog on a subdomain. I keep getting conflicting advice on this. In a whiteboard Friday Rand once said to NEVER host on a subdomain. But I know that google now associates links that redirect to the original site. I.e. If redpepperland.com redirects to repepper.land then redpepper.land should have all the link juice of redpepperland.com, right? But Moz doesn't recognize any inbound links to redpepper.land, I have to actually put redpepperland.com in as an additional site to see those links and the domain authority which worries me. So I guess two questions: 1. Does anyone have experience with Hubspot's blog? Will the subdomain hurt our SEO efforts? 2. Does google now know how to associate a redirect's link juice and domain authority to the page it redirects to? Not sure I know what I'm talking about at all but any help would be greatly appreciated!
Link Building | | redpepperland0 -
Is it Good For seo?
After Create i backlink use google add url tool to index the backlink url in google . is this method is good for seo
Link Building | | watchwrestling0 -
Blog commenting for SEO - Useful practice?
With most blog comments being no-follow, I was just wondering whether blog commenting for an SEO campaign these days was actually a worthwhile practice. Would love to get some insight on this.
Link Building | | Gavo0 -
How do I distributing Articles to the correct sites
I'm relatively new to the SEO world, however, I've landed myself a SEO job for a mobility bath, shower and wetroom company.
Link Building | | desktop_nev
I've optimize the pages and added links to directories BUT I would like to start gaining quality links. I've wrote articles, including keyword links, but I would like to know the best strategy to get articles distributed to generic/industry specific sites.
Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance1 -
Linkbuilding without blogging?
I am looking at starting to do some link building for my site. I have already done directory listing. What are my options for link building without blogs? Things like Wikihow?
Link Building | | EcommerceSite0 -
Why are good authority links to my site not showing?
Hi, about a month ago, I obtained a couple of good authority external links into my client's site. One of these is from a local government site, ie a .gov.uk website, which has a Domain Authority of 99 according to OSE and a page authority of 67. However, these links are not showing up in SEOmoz or OSE and the domain authority of my client's site has not changed. Why do the links not show? Surely a period of 5 weeks is long enough for these links to be indexed?
Link Building | | mfrgolfgti0 -
Back linking via blogging
I asked a different question, which this one might over lap. Say your website has 100 pages, and you blog on different sites for back linking- should you do an article per page to keep the back linking to each page fresh? So for a person like me this would take me 100 days to recycle around. Just trying to figure out the best way to do back linking.
Link Building | | sansonj0