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
-
Disavow domain ignored
Hi We did a domain disavow some months ago and webmaster tools told us those links were not pointing at us anymore. But suddenly the same domain has appeared again in our external links list according to webmaster tools. Our disavow document still contains that same domain as a disavowed domain, so we don't understand why is still being taken into account. Thanks
Link Building | | Canexel0 -
Guest Blogging good or bad?
Hello Mozzers, Matt Cutts once told that guest blogging is a bad way to get links, then he relativized it again and said it's okay. We all know Google doesn't want to count those links, what they want are editorially given links. Now my question, what's your view on this topic? Do you still use guest blogging as a link building technique? Best regards, grobro
Link Building | | grobro0 -
Guest blogging: is there a safe way to do it?
Following Google's nuking of My Blog Guest, is there any way of doing (high-quality, small-scale) guest posting safely? Specifically, do the tips from Neil Patel here (written Jan 22) still stand up? Only post on relevant blogs – ideally these blogs should also be larger than your website. In other words, do it because it will help with branding, traffic, and sales. Posting on bigger blogs that are also relevant will provide you with more good exposure than posting on small, unknown blogs. Avoid using rich anchor text – rich anchor text will become a huge red flag and will probably cause your site to get penalized eventually, especially if you are building these links through guest posts. Share the love – you won’t be able to link out to your site only. From Wikipedia to your competitors, you’ll have to link out to whichever site benefits the reader the most. Build up your author rank – with Google Plus becoming more popular, it will be easier for Google to determine how good of a writer you are. So, you’ll have to focus on publishing only valuable content as you won’t want crap tied to your author account. Co-citations are valuable – even if you don’t get a link from a guest post, just having your site mentioned in the article can help with rankings. I think Google will place more emphasis on co-citations in 2014.
Link Building | | Jeepster0 -
When you are manually posting to blogs, how closely related does the content of the blog have to be to the website?
For instance, if the website is for a hotel, would it be acceptable to post on travel blogs?
Link Building | | msmdz0 -
Blog Comments
We all get them ... spam blog comments. People do it to get link value back to their site. Recently, someone approached me to do this for our site but on niche sites that are related to our content and to provide good valueable comments within a blog post of about 100 words each, and genuinely try to engage.They also were talking about finding blogs that have "follow" links in their comments space, since most do not. I still declined it because it is somewhat 'grey-hat' rather than 'white-hat' linking, and we want to be above-board on everything. Although we personally declined this approach, I'm curious your thoughts though on whether gaining links from blog comments from related, niche sites is a good idea. Like this question? Give us a Big Thumbs Up! Thank you!
Link Building | | applesofgold0 -
What is the Optimal Guest Post Byline?
Hi Moz Community! What do you think is the optimal guest post byline or bio paragraph at the end of a guest post. Is it better to link to your homepage with your site name as anchor text AND a deep page with a target keyword phrase? Or is it better to just use one link to a deep/money page on your site with a keyword phrase?
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0 -
Blog Commenting good or bad?
I spend a good amount of time on SEO forums and I found a thread about building links within comments.. I personally don't see how putting my keyword in my name place and linking it to my site will benefit me, I feel like google is already on to this and no one is going to click on it. Is this a waste of time?
Link Building | | SEODinosaur1 -
External links--Does it matter which page they go to?
I'll be doing some linkbuilding in which I will be asking manufacturers of the products we sell to link back to our site. My thought was to have a single page for our "Valued Suppliers" with a badge that I would give them the embed code for. If the URL goes to a "Valued Supplier" page on our site where there are multiple manufacturers, will this help my entire site or only the page that's being linked to? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | AC_Pro0