So you’ve spent hours upon hours researching and writing the perfect article for your website blog. Now that you’ve spent all that time, you’d like to repost that content to another website or to social media. With little additional effort, you can reach new audiences but if you’re not careful, you could actually lose traffic to your website! So let’s go over the benefits and then how to repost without getting yourself into trouble.
The Benefits of Reposting Blog Content
Also called content syndication, reposting your content can have a lot of benefits.
- More traffic to your website
- Reach new audiences
- Save time
- Build brand awareness
- Establish credibility
- Build backlinks
By reposting on other sites and social media, you give your potential readers more ways to find and consume your content. You also reach new audiences and promoting your brand/website while you’re doing it. When you’re a guest writer for larger website (with larger audience), you’re establishing yourself as an authority on the topic that you’re writing about. As a guest writer, you can usually include a link back to your website, and that could be a very valuable backlink depending on website.
There’s also benefits to reposting content onto your blog from other websites. The main benefit is that you’re procuring high quality content (that you’re recommending) for your readers and giving them another reason to trust you and come back to your website. You’re also saving them time since they won’t have to visit other sites for further research. However, since you aren’t the original publisher, you won’t generate direct search engine traffic by reposting.
There’s a lot of good reasons to repost but make sure to follow the tips below for best results.
Tips for Reposting Articles Safely
I could have also titled this section: How to Avoid Losing Traffic When Reposting Blogs
Google does its best to attribute search engine traffic to the original publisher of the content. So let’s go into few easy tips to keep Google happy and reap the benefits of content syndication.
- Wait a week to repost
- Link back to the original article
- Tease the article instead
- Don’t repost every article
- Rework for a different keyword
Wait a week to repost
Sorry, you have to wait a week. It’s a good exercise in patience and gives Google enough time to crawl your site and index your beautiful new article. Put a to-do on your calendar or if you’re using WordPress, set to publish in a week.
Link back to the original article
Thus says Google, “If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article.”
This isn’t the whole story though; the link should be a canonical link which tells the search engines where the original content is. Simply add the “rel” attribute in your link. For example, if you were reposting my post here, you’d update your link like this:
<a rel=”canonical” href=”http://aaronbday.com/should-you-repost-your-blog-articles />Should you repost your blog articles?</a>
If you’re using a content editor, you may not see the option to add that. You may need to switch to code view.
Tease the article instead
Instead of reposting your entire post, you may want to simply provide a teaser and link back to your website for readers to continue reading. You may be able to simply include the first couple of paragraphs but writing a teaser to properly hook the reader is the best option. After all, the goal here is to force them to visit your site for the full content.
Don’t repost every article
Let’s be honest, not every article should be reposted. By only sharing your best content, you’re not overwhelming your audience and you’re putting your best foot forward.
Rework for different keyword
For the best search engine ranking, you should optimize each of your posts for a few keywords. To expand your reach for other keywords, you could rewrite your article for those keywords. If you rework the content enough, it won’t be deemed duplicate content and you can reach additional audiences. It takes a bit more time but may be worth it.
Reposting content onto your website
So far, I’ve been talking about reposting your content but you may want to offer additional quality reading on your website. As you’re reposting content from other authors, here’s a few things you can do to avoid getting flagged by Google or looking spammy.
- Link back to the original content with a canonical link.
- Perhaps summarize the article instead but still provide a link back to the original site.
In Short…
There’s a lot of great reasons to repost your quality content. By following the tips discussed, you can increase your traffic and reach new audiences. Happy writing!
PS, here’s the canonical link in action:
This article was originally posted on my own blog at Aaronbday.com.
