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
-
What is the difference between anchor text and external links?
I understand you 'Pro's' may fins this a silly question. But I'm a visual learner and I can't seem to grasp this. I've read the pages MOZ has provided on anchor text and external links and my question is, how are they different? And which one is more important to seo? Can someone who has a great ability to simplify things, please help me understand this. They seem very similar to me but, I know there has to be more to it. External links: External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source) **Anchor Text: **Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. Thanks is advance, Lauren.
Link Building | | MissThumann0 -
Been offered a no follow link on a blog post ?. Is it worth it ?
Hi All, We are having a go at doing our own link building and just wanted some advice on a couple of questions I've found some industry related blog sites which could be good but alot of them only offer a no follow link ?. Is this worth it ? And if ,so what is the advantage of having a no follow link ? as it won't directly help with our DA etc ? I've also noticed some of these sites link to each other or recommend each other (i.e other blog sites) which may be some sort of link network ?.. I take it this is bad ? and could be penalized by google ? thanks pete
Link Building | | PeteC120 -
Google Penalty due to external links
On Sep 3, we got a Manual Action by Google: unnatural links to your site Immediately we arranged to have all those links the rel="nofollow" atttributes, these were links set by our customers since we are hosting providers. We sent a reconsideration request to Google on Sep 8 and this is their answer:
Link Building | | netbuilder
We’ve reviewed the reconsideration requestfor xxxx and modified its status, but we still believe that content on your site or links to your site are outside our quality guidelines. No more info provided. - We double checked everything but could not find anything else that could harm us so we asked Google (in a new reconsideration request sent on Sep 11 to provide us some samples. On Sep 24 Google answers with a sample of 3 sites which contains links to us. After verification, all the external links to us have the rel="nofollow" attribute !! Today the manual action is not anymore a side-wide one but a partial one and applies to unnatural links--impact links. So it seems that we need to physically have those links removed? As well I checked https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604772?ctx=MAC and he does not refer at all about setting the rel="nofollow" attribute, Looks like Google wants the full monopoly on text links.0 -
What to write in Guest Post Email Subject
How to and what to write in Guest Blogging email Subject to get noticed? Please provide an example?
Link Building | | Dan_Brown10 -
Link building from keyword domains
Hi all, I am currently working on link building to our site http://www.betxpert.com which has a number of keywords I am targeting. I have become aware that domains with the keywords are available. We (in Danish) target the phrase "ekpert tips" and the domain www.eksperttips.dk is available. Would it be a good thing for us, to register this domain and do one of the following things: a) DNS forward traffic to our main site b) Build a small blog with minor content and linking to the main site with text links with the tekst "ekspert tips"? c) Simply do nothing, save the money and spend it otherwise... Hope someone can give me a sound advice. Best regards, Rasmus
Link Building | | rasmusbang0 -
Blogs that Thank Their Sponsors in a Blog Post
I've noticed some popular bloggers who create a monthly blog post that thanks their sponsors and the links are followed. Do you think that Google lets this slide or are they stopping some or all of the links from these blogs from passing link juice?
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0 -
How do I distribute blog content?
Morning Mozzers! I work for an online wedding retailer and we add new, unique, high quality content to our blogs on a daily basis. After adding the new content we Tweet it and mention it on our Facebbok page. My question is this: how can I distribute the content to generate back links? Any example sites or case studies of things you guys have done in the past would be great! Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
Linkbuilding on deep Blog pages
So I think I've got a good strategy going but wanted to get others feedback on it... I've been link building on a lot of blogs via reviews and giveaways. Frequently, these blogs give my posts limited exposure on the Home Page because the posts quickly get buried by new posts and eventually pushed off the home page to the "older posts" pages. Sometimes, reviews never even touche the home page because they live one level down on a "reviews" page which typically has 0 inbound links and low page authority. In these cases, I will use OSE to find the blog post with the strongest back link profile and request a link on that page instead. Typically, these posts are 2-3 years old so the bloggers are usually happy to give an old page some action. I'm a bit concerned though..Since these pages are frequently old, their content has not changed for years. Essentially, the pages have gone stale. Am I getting any benefit from these links? They typically have the 2nd best Page Authority on the Domain, but I'm wondering if the lack of fresh content kills all the value.
Link Building | | znotes0