Reposting my articles on other blogs - good or bad?

[imoney]

Hi there!

Our blog is full of really good articles on consumer finance topics. Recently we established contact with some local media and even government agencies who said they will be happy to repost our articles on their sites.

Question: is it ok to repost our articles as they are and link back to us, or shall we rewrite them to make them 100% original?

The media doesn't insist on original content, but I'd like to get SEO benefit from it (the sites are really good). If original content gives us more SEO value, we're happy to do it

Please advise.

P.S. Using rel=canonicals is not an option (it's government websites and some old school media - they are very not tech savvy).

[TomRayner]

Hi there

It will take a bit more time, but rewriting the content to be unique would be so, so worth it.

If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site. It won't think that you're offering as much worth to the other blog and subsequent referrals if you're regurgitating what has been said.

Now, the obvious exception to this rule are Press Releases through sites like PRWeb. This is a well-known anomaly in the industry (some say it passes juice, Matt Cutts tries to say it doesn't), but it's so far down the line now that it seems unlikely that Google is going to penalise your site for it.  The worse that would happen would be not passing any SEO value.

It is not safe to assume that this would be the case for sending your articles to these other blogs - it may very well penalise you.

By rewriting the content, you negate any risk of this and also ensure that the uniqueness will most likely pass the SEO benefits from the separate blogs.

To me, it's a matter of risk management, and all signs seem to point towards rewriting the content.  It's a bit of an annoyance, but a small price to pay considering the benefits.  It's also a great compliment to what you've written before, which has obviously proven to be very valuable, so congratulations on that!

[DougRoberts]

I'd echo Tom's response. Allowing your content to reported does expose you to risk.

Chances are these outlets have much stronger sites. How much traffic is landing on your blog articles? Is there a likelihood that you might start competing against your own content in the SERPS?

I would look at the the publications concerned and try to understand what matters to their readership, what kind of demographic do they have and then rewrite you articles (or create new content) specifically targeted to their audience.

If you've got a nice library of old blog posts then it might be worth creating an ebook of the very best content and using that as a link building or lean-gen asset.

[imoney]

Thanks for your suggestions, Tom!

I suspected Google might not like it, but didn't think it was that serious.

To what extent do you think we should rewrite our original articles? Is tweaking couple paragraphs enough, or should it be a complete 100% rewrite?

[TomRayner]

Generally, I'd say as original as you can make it.

But I'd definitely take on Doug's advice as well and see if you can incorporate your content into an article that directly serves each blog.  If you can accommodate it to their target audience, that would be fantastic.

Invariably, I often find it easier to write something completely new rather than rewrite something multiple times, so I think if you can take the general meat of your content and serve it specifically for each blog, I think you're going to see more than just SEO strength, but genuine, positive user engagement and probably traffic.

[englebert]

I agree with the others. 'Remarketing' is the way to go. If you have a loose idea, try and think of the multiple routes you could go down, or what different examples you could use to make a point.

I'd suggest reviewing old content. It's probably out of date anyway, so it's a perfect excuse to make it relevant oncemore and use hand it over to a another website you use.

If there is an opportunity to relate your content to what's going on in the news (i.e. up to the minute relevancy), it's good for indexing, sharing and hits.

[simon_realbuzz]

Hi Tom,

I wonder if I might question you on this point you raised:

"If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site."

Is content syndication therefore an absolute no-no these days? I'm aware of many of the best practices for syndicating content such as getting the content partner to specify the originator as canonical version or getting a link back to your original version in order that your article is not usurped in SERPs, but is it really the case that syndicated content with dofollow links to our own site would lead to some sort of penalty?

Our quality content is used by many sites (quite often sites with high authority) and these sites will link back to us. Are you suggesting this could lead to some sort of penalty or even a site-wide penalty?

Thanks in advance.