Can I repost my guest-authored content?
Writing content for another site as guest author or blogger can have many benefits. It could help you get more exposure, especially if you’re writing for a site that’s a lot bigger than yours. Working with other sites also gives you the opportunity to build potentially worthwhile (business) relationships and broaden your network. You might even get paid for your guest articles. Another obvious advantage, of course, is gaining valuable backlinks to your site.
Now, this doesn’t mean you should start sending out loads of mediocre articles to every blog that’s even remotely relevant to your own. A better strategy: guest-write great content for the right website, perhaps a few guest posts, and engage with the audience: you’ll surely get noticed.
But, once you’ve invested a lot of time in writing a great article that you’re very proud of, odds are you also want to put that content on your own site. Preferably without creating duplicate content issues. What are your options, in that case?
Yossi sent us a question that shows this dilemma:
I sometimes write articles for a third party website. I’d also like to put them on my own site. But I noticed the other site set a rel=”canonical” attribute pointing to their page. So, how can I put the articles I wrote on my site and benefit from them, without getting a penalty from Google?
Watch the video or read the transcript for the answer!
Reposting guest-authored content
“The problem is, Yossi, if you publish them on that other site first, and that other site is bigger than yours, then the chance of you ranking with that content is close to zero.
So, if you want to rank with content, you need to decide where to put it first, and otherwise, you have to put a canonical on that third-party website to yours. But if they’re paying you to write that, or if there’s another sort of deal, they’ll probably not be willing to do that. So, decide where you want to rank with content, publish it there first, otherwise put a canonical from the page that you want not to rank to the page that you want to rank.
But if you can’t do any of that, then I would not go through the trouble of publishing it again on your own site. Because it really doesn’t make all that much sense. And you’d be better off just publishing a short snippet on your own site, saying, “Hey, I wrote this on that other site.” Good luck.”
Read more: What is duplicate content? »
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Nice SEO tips and tricks, thank you for sharing this idea
Super helpful, thanks!
What about editing a portion of the content so that it’s not the exact same article but still offers the same general information?
Hi Jessica! If you want to reuse an article that way, you’d have to edit a significant portion of its contents. Otherwise, Google may still recognize it as duplicate content, which it defines as “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” So keep that in mind; in the end you may be better off writing a new article ;-)
Hi Joost, What a great topic. A few follow up questions.
1. What if the other site is smaller and not a publisher?
2. Are your comments based solely on SEO? What about the value of the author of the content and her own audience? If she posts it on her site and shares it with her FB, Twitter and/or LinkedIn followers plus her newsletter and pleases her regular audience, isn’t that a case where there is value in posting it in the two places?
Hi Dan! Great to hear you enjoyed this topic! About your followup questions: 1: If the other site is smaller, you may be able to beat them, but implementing a canonical is probably still a good idea. 2: A guest-author may already get exposure and a bigger audience through the other site’s social media/newsletter, depending on the kind of arrangement they have. But if those are very important channels to the author, of course he/she can decide to post the article on their own site after all (making sure to take the right steps to avoid duplicate content).
Hi Sir
Last time, Seo By Yoast Plugin provided the meta keyword column to filled and it already make Me interested, but now must be purchase to get the meta keyword column, right?
Hi! Actually, we removed the meta keyword setting a while ago, for both our free and premium plugin, to encourage our users to invest their time in more useful SEO aspects. You can read more about that here: https://yoast.com/meta-keywords/