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SEO Pitfalls of Crossposting 

Posted on Mon Feb 16, 2009 by Tom Kraak
In: SEO, SEM | 5 Comments

When doing research for DNN Friday, our weekly DotNetNuke news roundup, I often come across content that is duplicated across multiple blogs, a practice also known as crossposting. DNN core team members are a perfect example as most of them maintain personal blogs in addition to posting on dotnetnuke.com.

While I understand the motivation behind this type of content sharing, for most smaller sites and organizations, it will quite often have a negative effect on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. First and foremost, you are producing duplicate content, which is widely frowned upon by search engines. Furthermore, you are creating yourself unnecessary “competition” as shown in the screenshot below.

This in turn diminishes your blog’s effectiveness to drive traffic as searchers ultimately have to make a choice on what to click on when scanning search engine results pages (SERPs.)

But even if you can live with the 2 points made above, what you can’t afford is wasting “link juice.” Incoming links are deemed as votes for your content and for your site as whole and are the primary force behind search engine rankings. By serving up multiple copies of your content across domains, however, you are essentially spreading yourself thin. I consider myself a responsible linkerati, meaning that I will make a concerted effort to link to the most appropriate source, but why take even the slightest chance when every link counts?

Do you maintain a personal site, but also write for your employer’s blog? Do you find yourself crossposting every so often or even on a regular basis? I would love to hear your side of the story.




Comments

Rich Campbell Monday, February 16, 2009 at 11:24 PM Rich Campbell says:

Thanks Tom. We cross-post on weblogs.asp.net to get the exposure to the wider .Net audience. Our blog readership is somewhat limited. What's the best way to leverage another outlet with a larger audience? (e.g. blogs, forums, etc.)

Tom Kraak Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 9:33 AM Tom Kraak says:

Rich - you are thinking in the right directions by trying to leverage larger sites / blogs to draw traffic to your blog, but you should do it with unique content rather then crossposting.

For instance, one of your developers could use his blog to discuss a specific problem he faced while working on an Engage module and then intelligently link to the engagesoftware.com product pages, etc.

Will Strohl Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 9:54 AM Will Strohl says:

An example of what you would consider a responsible alternative would be nice. I have placed a link and notice about the duplicate content when doing this, but I guess a summary and a referral link might be better?

Jeff B Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 10:17 AM Jeff B says:

What about using an approach of extracting the summary of a blog/article on my site to post to another site and referencing back to the full blog/article back to my site?

For instance, I use Ventrian NA. I don't use the summary feature. I instead have my templates setup to pull the first 500 characters of a blog/article to show on my main page. If I started using the summary feature but do not have it posted on my site, and instead use that summary feature to post on other sites?

This may prove to be a good workaround?

Tom Kraak Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 2:12 PM Tom Kraak says:

@ Will & Jeff - the summary approach will work well. Just make sure that the summary is written in such a way that it stands on it's own as opposed to being a copy of part of the blog post that you are referencing.

Comments are closed

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