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 It's probably out of date anyway, so it's a perfect excuse to make it relevant oncemore and use hand it over to a another website you use.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
-
Could someone be sabataging my site by bad backlinks?
Hello, As I have said before I am new to SEO and especially new to this type of software. I am trialing MOZ, ahrefs and MajesticSEO. I just used the Site Explorer on ahrefs and it showed me that a bunch of backlinks was created today but I haven't engaged anyone in "SEO" for many months. Why would this be? See the image for a screenshot. yhpUxFv.png
Link Building | | infinart0 -
The better my blog gets, the lower my rankings!
My blog was hit by Google Panda on July 21. My rankings dropped dramatically overnight. Nothing I do is helping. In fact, the day my guest post was published on one of the biggest blogs in my niche (DA over 70) my Google impressions dropped to an all time low and then got worse. (250 impressions and 12 clicks) You can see the first drop and the second drop in these screenshots and yes Google Webmasters and Google Analytics match. http://tinypic.com/r/2dvtvlj/5 http://tinypic.com/r/4u83t4/5 I am getting more fans, subscribers, traffic etc but my Google traffic just gets worse. I would really like to get some organic traffic! But I have no idea why this is happening. I checked manual actions and there is nothing. I cleaned up crawl errors and duplicate content. I get several backlinks a week within my niche from high authority sites. I just don't get it and I am very discouraged. What should I do?
Link Building | | 2bloggers0 -
Adding Anchor Text in Blog Comments
Hi, could someone please let me know the correct html code to get an anchor text link in a blog comment please? Thanks!
Link Building | | Clicksjim1 -
Adding a link section - good or bad?
Hi all, I am currently thinking about adding a link section to my site. In 2010 I released a new version of the site, where one of the main differences to the old site was that a link section was left out. Now i see in webmaster tools that a lot of old links are still indexed but has a 500 error. My question is: 1. Will my site in general benefit from having a link sections with relevant links for the users - in terms of SEO? 2. Will my site benefit from creating a link section and having all the old link section URLs in google redirected to the new section? Best regards, Rasmus
Link Building | | rasmusbang0 -
Manual Blog Submission Services - Any Recommendations ?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone could recommend a high quality blog directory submission service ? I know that the best method is to do this yourself - but the time required to do so is enourmous, so although I may manually submit to a few of the very best directories myself, I'm looking for a good quality manual service to do the rest. I'm willing to pay a decent amount to a quality submission service as I want it done as near as possible to doing it myself. Thanks for your thoughts.
Link Building | | James770 -
Auto Blog Content
Hi i was thinking about to build auto blog website that will post about twice a day auto generated content related to my keywords that im trying to rank for. and for inbound linking, i will write original articles with a keyword anchor text, and will link to auto generated content for that keyword? so my question is: is it good idea to link from original content to auto generated?will it help my rankings ? Thanks
Link Building | | xverticle0 -
Article Marketing
Hello, Our nearest ecommerce competitor has quite a few links from article directories like ezinearticles.com and similar sites. I know these sites are bottom of the barrel in SEO, but I've been thinking of writing a few 500 word articles and posting them on some of the strongest of these article directories. Maybe I'll stick to ezinearticles.com since I only like to get links from sites that are going to stick around. What do you think - which of these article directories going to be here for the long term? Mainly what I'm asking for here is a top 5 list of the best article directories, or perhaps a better article marketing strategy. I loved that whiteboard friday on Article Marketing. I'm going to watch that again. Thank you.
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Ezine articles - worth it with a PA of 1?
If I write an article on Ezine Articles, it has a page authority of 1. I guess this is to be expected until that page is crawled, but is it actually worth writing these articles? Does the DA 'count' for anything here? Can I ever expect the PA to increase? (unless I build links to the article - in which case I may as well spend that time building links to my site)
Link Building | | seanmccauley0