The biggest market online today is the content marketplace. Every top business, brand and celebrity has an established online presence. One of the biggest ways online presence is being projected is through the content that is posted on blogs and websites.

But not every online personality puts the right energy in producing content regularly. However, blogs have become highly competitive in terms of quality and value, so online users have a wide range of content to choose from; likewise, they can make different choices of brands. \

And where content is regularly posted, it doesn’t necessarily become leads or generate traffic. This can be quite disappointing especially when you are expecting to generate some earnings or get sales from the leads.

This is why many people go as far as posting content on several media platforms as a means of generating as much traffic as they can. Just as they can benefit from such a move, it can also become counter-productive.

Publishing content on several sites while projecting your brand and the image of your organization can result in duplication of content if it is not properly done.

Having Duplicate Content Has Disadvantages

Whenever you try reaching out to the audience by re-posting or syndicating the same content on several platforms, you may end up with more outreach, but with some unwanted problems such as loss of traffic and Google penalizing you through your content that is losing ranking on its search engine.

If you have posted an article and also put it up on other social media, it could gain higher ranks there than it ranks on Google.

Losing Traffic

When your website content is indexed by Google and you get the content re-published or syndicated on other sites, say LinkedIn or Medium, the content might be ranked higher on them than on your site.

This can make you lose traffic on your site, as your ranking will start dropping. If your goal is to generate traffic, you may end up losing more traffic than you are generating. But if your goal is just to educate people, loss of traffic might not mean much to you.

Now, when you re-post your content on other sites, it may appear as duplicate content, and this may leave Google with no option other than to choose one of the versions which may not favor your own site. They may also decide to penalize you by flagging down your website for producing duplicate content.

The Rules Guiding Re-Publishing of Content

Let’s take a look at what you should or shouldn’t do when re-publishing on platforms such as LinkedIn or Medium.

Publishing on platforms like LinkedIn or Medium can boost the profile of your company, make more people aware of your brands and get you more leads. If you have to re-post an article from your blog on such platforms, follow these simple guidelines.

1. When you publish a post, give it some time before you re-post it on another platform. Be patient and wait for a few weeks, so the original article can be indexed by Google before the duplicate versions surface; otherwise, it might have a difficult time deciding on the original article to be indexed.

2. If you wish to drive traffic to your site with the content, then you shouldn’t publish the whole of it on those platforms. You may give them the first two or three paragraphs, and then you add the link to your blog, so visitors can visit your blog and read the complete article there.

3. It should not be every article published on your blog that should be re-posted. If you are going to repost an article on a platform, you must ensure that the topic is relevant to the audience members of that platform.

Don’t make re-posting of articles habitual. Re-posting an article once or twice in a month and on the appropriate platform gives the article some additional relevance, as it will be on the mind of the audience for a long time. When you repost articles strategically, it can generate a lot of traffic as it meets the needs of your audience.

4. As you plan to re-publish an article, your audience is the main factor that will determine the platform and what is being published. Ask yourself if your target audience is on that platform. Is the language and tone of the article up to their standard or is it far above what they can understand?

How valuable will the content be to them? After evaluating your audience, you might decide to re-write the content, so the audience can fully benefit from it.

5. When republishing content, you might want to make a few adjustments especially for the sake of your audience. You may review the title and add a few pictures that will captivate your audience.

You can use Photoshop or Canva to create suitable images or you may wish to use stock photos from royalty-free sites. Make sure your content is optimized for search engines, so you can rank high and gain traffic, and add links to other related content on your website.

6. When you are re-posting on a platform like Medium, you have to decide if you’ll be doing it from your personal online account or from your company account. This will be determined by who owns the original content and the posting goal.

If the posting is about a new brand that you are marketing for your company, then using your company account will be the best option – so, even when leads are generated, they can become potential customers for your product.

However, if you wish to state your position or give your opinion on something, then it is better for you to use your personal online account.

If you do not want the site you are syndicating on to get a higher ranking than the site that has the original content, you can use a rel=canonical link to indicate the website that is of priority and which one should be indexed. This will allow your website to take the credit for the article and not the external website.

Re-publishing your content on other platforms can have many advantages. For instance, these platforms will have wider coverage and more traffic than your blog and it can be quite easy to gain leads from them if they are the right audience.

But re-publishing on other platforms does come with some disadvantages as well. However, these can be managed by taking those steps as shown above. With these steps taken, you will hardly have to worry about the problem of duplicate content.

Acknowledgement Statement

This presentation contains images that were used under a Creative Commons License. Click here to see the full list of images and attributions:

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