Re-purposing Blog Posts as Articles
Have you been holding off from re-purposing some of your older blog posts as articles because you thought the search engines would identify that as duplicate content and deliver a penalty in the ranking department?
I have.
I understand that submitting articles to other sites is a good way to generate traffic to, and improve the ranking of, your blog or other website. But I’ve not done it till now, mainly because I saw it as “more work” and especially as requiring a more structured and time-consuming process than writing blog posts.
So what about re-purposing older blog posts, with a bit of updating, some new references and so on, but with the heavy lifting - or heavy writing - already done? Because, just like anyone who has been blogging for a while, I have stacks of material upon which to draw.
But wasn’t there a risk of those articles being tagged by the search engines as duplicate content?
And wouldn’t that mean that my site’s ranking actually suffered, rather than benefiting?
Thanks to Patsi Krakoff at Writing Great Ezines, I found my way today to a lucidly written post, in which Jill Whalen skewers The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth.
She makes a very helpful distinction between what the search engines don’t like or appreciate and what generates search engine penalties. While none of us want search engine penalties, nor do we need to jump at shadows.
Search engine penalties are reserved for pages and sites that are purposely attempting to trick the search engines in one form or another. Penalties can be meted out algorithmically when obvious deceptions exist on a page, or they can be personally handed out by a search engineer who discovers an infraction through spam reports and other means. To many people’s surprise, penalties rarely happen to the average website. Most that receive a penalty know exactly what they did to deserve it.
I understand now that re-purposing an article and even having it show up on more than one site, is not going to draw down on me what Jill Whalen amusingly refers to as “the wrath of the Google gods”.
Incidentally, I would love to think there was a way of speaking and writing intelligently and clearly about search without anthropomorphizing algorithms - what they “like” or “don’t like”: I do it, as Jill Whalen and others do, but I feel uncomfortable with the practice. Another post, for another day. Which might even generate an article as well!
Tags: duplicate-content, duplicate-posts, Google, Jill-Whalen, Patsi-Krakoff, Search, search-engines
0 opinions for Re-purposing Blog Posts as Articles
No one has left a comment yet. You know what this means, right? You could be first!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: