People tend to ask me a lot on my various blogs whether I mind if they reproduce my posts. Oftentimes this arises when a guest poster asks if they can repost their post on their own personal blog. My gut was to always say yes — especially for guest posters — but it turns out that Google may have a problem with that.
To understand why this is even a policy, you need to understand “scraper sites.” A scraper site is a website which [usually] automatically steals content from sources around the internet in an effort to appear like a legitimate website. You’ve probably noticed these sites in your spam filter as linkbacks to websites saying something completely stupid like:
Josh Auriemma has a new post today about Excited about my cherry twinkies: “So you’re probably asking yourself, ‘what’s the deal with the Google duplicate content penalty anyway? Well let …” Original site here [link to my post]
These sites were a very efficient way to spam search engines back in the day. Enter the duplicate content penalty. Nowadays, Google compares its index for duplicate content in an effort to find people trying to game the system. So you’ve let Jonny Appleseed republish one of your posts, but it’s also on your website. Now Google has to figure out which result to display in the SERPs, because it’s not going to display both. Do you really want to risk it returning Jonny’s website instead of yours? Probably not.
According to Google, best practice is to make Jonny put a link back to my original article. That may indicate to Google that my website should be displayed instead of his. Still, many SEOs (myself included) believe that sites with duplicate content take a penalty in the SERPs. In my opinion, it’s probably not significant, but I suspect that it’s there. As a result, if I’m working to build up a website, I really don’t want duplicate content floating around.
What I usually do if I’ve guest posted somewhere is give a summary, in different words, about the article on my own blog. I’ll then link to the full article on the main website. That way I don’t risk duplicate content with either site.
As always, there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules. Just use your best judgment depending on the situation.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Bruce conducted this interview or Demko did? ,
Some might do it every day, while others might update every two weeks. ,
But taking care of your mental health is too important to ignore, even if it embarrasses others close to you. ,
This is no bragging really. ,