Reblogging and Reposting. What not to do.

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Published: May 20, 2020

We all know the phrase “Content is King.” If you want good SEO and if you want to rank on Google and other search engines then you need, need, need high quality, well written content.

One of the best ways to provide content is through blogging. Blogging, the word, has lot of baggage. But a blog is any set of regular updates, whether they’re news updates, photo updates, calendar & events updates or some other type of update. If you make regular additions to your website, you have a blog.

Many of our clients like to draw inspiration from existing content, this is awesome! Gathering content from other reputable sources can lend some credibility and help you establish an informative piece. Cited sources are a great way to build trust amongst an audience. However, we’ve seen a few clients do some shady things. Namely, stealing content.

Copy and pasting content from another website is not only a very shady and wrong thing to do, it’s also very bad for SEO. Google has started to penalize websites for duplicating content. This is an attempt at cracking down on scraper sites that ride on the waves of other’s well written words.

Even if you have permission, and even if the other site belongs to the same organization, and even if it’s well cited, and even if you link back to the original article, it’s still a bad idea. It servers little to no purpose.

  • Your site won’t get an SEO boost. (in fact, it’ll get punished)
  • You’re losing losing trust amongst your audience.
  • If that content changes, or gets removed, or is wrong, you’ll never know.
  • You’re just asking for trouble.

Here are some DON’Ts and some DOs of reposting content.

Never, ever, ever repost an entire article from another website.

This is an obvious theft of intellectual property. Also, search engines will punish both sites for duplicate content. Not only are you stealing content, you’re stealing traffic.

Instead of reposting the entire article of someone else’s, why not write your own and cite theirs? Use their article for research and inspiration. This is often referred to as the “Skyscraper Technique” and has been proven to increase SEO and audience trust.

For, example, we drew information from WebsiteMuscle.com’s article “The Dos and Don’ts of Reposting Articles in Your Blog” and Adam McLane’s “How to Repost a Blog Post With Style and Grace“.

Use excerpts from other sites, but limit their length.

Choose a part of the article that speaks most directly to your point, include it, and cite the author. You can wrap the excerpt in a light description of your own. Most site authors won’t mind this and it often serves as a compliment. Just, make sure you cite the original author and link back to their article.

Visually separate your content from your excerpts.

If you are going to use content from another site, make sure it stands out in some way. This helps the reader to understand that they are reading someone else’s words.

For any quote of more than two sentences use the block quote feature of any blog editor. To make it even more clear that I’m quoting something, I like to italicize the whole piece.

Adam McLane

Always link back to your cited content.

This is important for providing due credit. Also, we as content authors should be responsible and allow readers to see our source material. Plus trackbacks and linkbacks are good manners.