Content Re-Publishing & Duplicate Content: Twitter Chat with @ErenMckay #VCBuzz

Post on by VC Bee

Content-Re-Publishing-&-Duplicate-Content--Twitter-Chat-with-@ErenMckay-#VCBuzzGiving your content wings without spreading duplicate content is an interesting issue and you’ll have trouble finding a definitive answer to it.

Today we’ll try to give you one with our today’s mentor @ErenMckay on board!

***Please sign in here to follow the chat -> twchat.com/hashtag/vcbuzz

***Important: Join this event on Google Plus to be notified of upcoming chats (It’s easier with daytime savings and different time zones!)

About Eren

Eren Mckay is social media strategist and SEO consultant. Check out her blog mckaysocial.com

Make sure to connect to Eren on Linkedin

Questions we discussed

Q1 How did you become online marketer? What’s your career path?

I started out with SEO back in 2006. For many years that was my only focus.Then in 2011, I decided to expand.  I saw that SEO is only a piece of the puzzle& I needed other parts of the marketing engine working for long term SEO to happen.

I studied content marketing, social media strategies& began implementing them for clients. The biz grew through word of mouth. A site that has great On Page SEO but doesn’t have a Content Strategy, a Social Media Plan & CRO won’t be a sustainable biz

For sure. I hadn’t even put up a brochure site and really had no time to do so because I was busy with client work.

My MckaySocial site only got a WordPress install in the last few months LOL

Q2 What is duplicate content and why do authors and publishers need to stay away from it?

Duplicate Content is basically if there are 2 or more urls with the same exact content on those pages or posts.

Google has clearly stated that they don’t want to see duplicate results from the same site. It lowers the quality of the SERPs.

Google’s updated search quality guidelines show they’re against having duplicate content on your site. Do a control F search in that document for the word duplicate and you’ll find all the places where Google refers to it.

I agree and there’s more problems that can arise too.

Site owners need to make sure that their site doesn’t have duplicate content by only putting each post in one category. Having each post in only one category is also a better user experience most of the time.

I strongly discourage the use of tags but if you really want to use them, you’ll need to use the rel=”canonical” for each tag URL.

Not “as is”. I discourage reposting your own content without first re-writing it.  I mean actually sitting down and rewriting every single word. Never spin anything ever ever ever.  I will explain more about re-writing further on.

The rel=”canonical” link element will indicate to the Google bots which URL is preferred. Google does not recommend blocking duplicate content on your site through robots.txt but rather using the rel=”canonical”

Many times content management systems automatically create multiple URLS for one piece of content. Sometimes those URLs can have a 301 permanent redirect implemented when there is no need for that URL to continue to exist.

Other times it is the case of the rel=”canonical” being implemented (when that URL needs to be there for a better UX). Having a lot of duplicate content on your site will lower the overall site quality score.

Here is the exact page where Google gives orientation on using canonical URLs.

You need to use the rel=canonical so you don’t get hit with Panda. Panda is now a part of Google’s core ranking signals.

Make sure to use the more tag after the first 2 or 3 sentences of a post to prevent duplicate content on your own site. This is what the more tag looks like in HTML <!–more–>

Also please save this video to watch where @JohnMu explains how Google treats duplicate content.

Q3 Do you recommend content syndication as one of content marketing tactics? Why or why not?

We covered in Q2 the basics about duplicate content and how to avoid it on your own site. Just so y’all know, I will caps words that I want to emphasize, I’m not yelling, just making sure you don’t miss it. I want to show that duplicate content is not just an issue within your own site here in Q3.

Duplicate content can be a problem with content syndication too. If you syndicate your content without changing anything, you are basically telling the bots that your site has duplicate content.

If you syndicate only a few posts “as is” out of thousands AND you are an authority site, you may not have a big problem. In the case of an established site, the authority overrides the issue. However if you have a site that doesn’t have huge authority, Panda, which is now a part of the algo, might hit you.

Here’s an article that talks about Panda and content syndication. I have also spoken to SEO friends of mine who had Panda issues with content syndication. When they removed the RSS entirely, their rankings came back. Because of the NDA can’t show you the sites .

When someone scrapes send them a DMCA notice. But popular blogs have authority therefore it shouldn’t be a huge issue.

Another piece of advice is to not show the entire post in your RSS settings of your blog, only a snippet. In this video Cutts says one of the factors that determines rankings is the quality of your content.

What Google sees as high quality content. Taken from that page Google says: Your site’s content should be UNIQUE, specific and high quality. Also taken from that page, Google says: It should NOT be mass-produced or outsourced on a large number of other sites.

Amit Singhal (senior vice president at Google & head of the core ranking team) wrote an article on the Webmaster Central Blog. This is the article so you can bookmark and read later. In that article Amit is talking about what is high quality content. He said: Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis? That was one of the questions that webmasters should ask themselves when determining what a high quality website is. Notice that Amit used the word ORIGINAL four times in that question when referring to what a high quality website is.

If the content is spewed all over the internet, it definitely is NOT unique nor original. Common logic shows that if a large quantity of your content on your site is duplicate, then you start to resemble content farms. We all know that Googlers have numerously talked about content farms ‘cluttering’ up the web.

Another source indicating that syndicating the content “as is” could be a problem. Notice the wording they give for one of the points that’s considered little or no added value: Content from other sources. Google DOES give advice that IF you syndicate your content, that you should indicated the preffered URL with the rel=”canonical”.  You can find that advice here on this page.

Q4 How to re-publish your content across different channels without running into a risk of creating duplicate content?

The biggest problem is that syndicated sites most of the time don’t give the option to rel=”canonical” to your original.

My biggest advice is this: take the time to rewrite your entire article one time. If you syndicate to many places at once and you have many backlinks to the original article it might look like link manipulation. It’s best to syndicate to a few places, wait a few days, syndicate in another place, wait a week, syndicate elsewhere, etc.

If you don’t want to take that much time just link back to your social profile instead of your website when syndicating – that way it won’t look like a link scheme; because it really isn’t, you’re just trying to get visible online.

  1. List of places to syndicate your rewritten article: Medium, LinkedIn Pulse, Quora, Facebook Notes, Google Plus, Hubpages
  2. Free Blogging Platforms but definitely don’t link to your site when using these. They can get hit with Penguin. Examples of some Free Blogging Platforms: Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, Wardrobe & more. When syndicating to free blogging platforms make sure to link to your social accounts so you can be found. Make sure to take advantage of the tagging system on free blogging platforms. This will get your post in front of more people.  
  3. Create a Powerpoint Presentation and upload to places like SlideShare, SlideWorld, SlideBoom, AuthorStream, SlideRocket
  4. Create a podcast out of it and upload to iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher, Mira, SoundCloud, BlogTalkRadio etc. (for the podcast you don’t have to re-write anything- yay!)
  5. Make a video out of it and submit to YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler
  6. You can also transform your content into an ebook on Scribd and Papyrus
  7.  Make your rewritten article into an infographic with free tools like Canva and PicMonkey. You can also use images from Pixabay to create your infographic. Places that will easily accept your infographic submission are not high quality so link back to your social profile. (to be extra careful take a screenshot of each image with the terms for each image used so you have that backed up)

Q5 A mom and an online marketer, please share your productivity secrets!

I keep a physical agenda which I call my BrainTracker.. it has weekly, monthly and yearly To Dos. I keep track of all of the sites I use on a daily basis, create a bookmark and always leave the bookmark bar open, that way I can access all of the sites with just one click.

You can also create an HTML page and upload it to your site with all of your bookmarks organized and no index it. You can noindex your personal bookmark page in the robots.txt file of your site or even password protect it.

I created a private google plus community with just me in it with all the categories of what I need with links and resources. I can find anything quickly there in my private G+ community through a quick search. I also created a Word doc where I organize things through hashtags and quickly find what I want by searching for the hashtag.

Our previous content marketing chats:

 

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