On this week’s episode of SEO for Sex Bloggers, we’re talking about the content on your blog! I know all my blogger friends work so incredibly hard to write things for their respective blogs, it would be such a shame if you got penalized by Google because of that content. In order to keep search results the best they can be, Google sometimes penalizes sites that participate in shady practices like buying links, hacked sites, and yes, duplicate content.
So what is duplicate content?
If you write a post for you blog, but then someone else steals your work and posts it on their own site word for word, that’s duplicated content. (There’s other kinds, but this is the kind we’re talking about today.) Aside from the issues with someone stealing your work, you also now have search engines to worry about. If a search engine sees your content in multiple places across the web, it sees it as spam, and that content is much less likely to rank in search results.
Similarly, if you write a post for your personal blog, but also post it on another platform, the search engine will likely still see that as duplicated content as well. Unless it’s Medium. More on that soon.
While this might make sense in order to get more visibility for your work, ultimately it will be detrimental to your search engine visibility.
Now, choose! Maximize your visibility or risk your search presence.
Well, not really. In fact, managing your content if you know that duplication is an issue can be easy if you plan ahead. You can promote your content on a different site in excerpts, and link back to your site where readers can find the post or article in full. Or, you can choose a platform like Medium that allows you to dictate the preferred version of your content.
Medium is a good choice for this because it’s easy to use a rel=canonical attribute. A canonical attribute helps search engines determine which version of your content is the ultimate authority. You can use this on your own site as well, if you have duplicate pages (like pages with and without a trailing slash, for some reason, such as example.com and example.com/.) you want to manage. Although if you have duplicate pages like that, let’s chat about it because it might be causing other problems.
Keeping track of your work.
Sometimes people steal your content without your knowledge. Sometimes you have to audit your own work and make sure you know where all your content is. In order to do this, you can search very specific sentence in your article in Google, as long as you use quotation marks around the sentences to search exactly for that sentence.
A slightly easier (though not free) way to keep track of your content is to use Copyscape. Copyscape Premium lets you check your content whenever you want, while Copysentry does the checking for you.
If you’re concerned about your content appearing elsewhere on the web, let’s chat. I’m always available on Twitter, or with my contact form.
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