Handling External links to articles in a blog

[dspete]

I have a blog that has it's own articles but then also want to feature third-party sites that have my op-ed content on them. Wondering what is the best practice for handling external links.

The reason we want to do this:

• Make sure our followers and people who subscribe to our blog see all our content (especially when a third-party "high authority" publisher is featuring articles from our authors
• We also want to be able to get a ranking for the article title when someone searches for it on Search Engines. i.e I write an article for hubspot called "my article about something". When googling "my article about something" I want to see both the Hubspot listing (where my article originated on) as well as a link to my website where I show an abstract (original abstract) and then the link links to the hubspot article.

For example:

www.myblog.com/listing

(renders a listing of articles with links to each individual article)

If showing an "abstract" for the blog article and then linking out to the third-party source (where content is featured)

www.myblog.com/category/post-title

(renders actual article page)

When showing an individual post-title page what are the minimum requirements (META TAGS, length or amount of characters ,etc)

Thanks in advance!

[AlanBleiweiss]

How you implement this will determine whether you get more visibility in search results or harm your own efforts on-site and off-site.

Here are some key points:

Never duplicate the full content across multiple sites if you can avoid that. Duplication of entire entries just forces Google to "figure it all out" and they often do so poorly.

Two solid methods that can both work for your overall needs:

1. Create a "Press" or similar section in your site. Each time a new article shows up in a trusted off-site location, add it to your press section.  Either just the Titles and a unique snippet explaining what's contained in the off-site article, or with more info, as long as the info is almost all unique, and not copied from the off-site version.

If you generate a lot of these, be sure to use proper indexable pagination in your site's list of outbound press links.

2. Write full blog articles on your own site that link to those articles, but where you go deep in your own content - make it mostly unique and only do so if you are sure it's a quality piece in its own right.

Either way can work - the 2nd version is more likely to get both the off-site and your own piece indexed most of the time, however if the "press" versions are also robust, they can rank as well.

Here's a screen-capture of how I did that for one of my best articles a couple years ago. The 1st entry is the original article, the 2nd entry is my own site's page about it.

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