Repost your tech blog, get a larger audience without hurting SEO
If blogging is one of your goals for 2020 you are reading the right blog post. Setting goals for a new year is a lot better than resolutions as goal setting is proactive whereas resolutions give out a reactive connotation. Anyhow, in this post we are going to find out about websites where you should repost your tech blog content that will fetch more audience to your content and will not hamper the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your website.
Assumptions #
- You already have a blog and post some content
- You want to get more readers to your content
- Have a basic understanding of SEO and duplicate content impact on SEO
Let’s get started.
What is SEO? Is Duplicate content bad? #
Wikipedia says:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.
So getting people on your website when they search for things with a pull strategy is SEO basically. To do good SEO you need to consider many factors and avoiding duplicate content is one of them. In one of the posts on Hobo-web it mentions:
A good rule of thumb is; do NOT expect to rank high in Google with content found on other, more trusted sites, and don’t expect to rank at all if all you are using is automatically generated pages with no ‘value add’.
So if duplicate content is bad, how do we solve this issue?
Canonical URLs to the rescue #
We can tell Google and other search engines that the main source of this post is someplace else and this is another verified copy of the same content with canonical links. Google says:
A canonical URL is the URL of the page that Google thinks is most representative from a set of duplicate pages on your site.
From Moz’s perspective:
A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.
So, if you can set the canonical URL of your content submitting it to multiple sites will not hurt your SEO. I am not an expert in this matter but these are my two cents :) for you to get a bigger audience.
Why submit to multiple sites in the first place? #
Different people consume information from varied sources. Similar to brands of tea/coffee, people prefer to get their information from different sources. If you can post your tech content to multiple sources including the master copy on your blog/domain you have the possibility to reach a much wider audience.
Where should I post my tech content then? #
Let’s look at the websites that accept your tech content and also allow you to have a canonical link for them:
Dev.to #
Dev.to is also known as ThePracticalDev on twitter. It is an amazing open community of technologists like you and me. The good part about posting our content here is that there is no editorial process and your content will be published on one of the top ~7300 websites in the world in an instant. They have a good tagging system too and potential readers for your content on this website are huge. If you click the ... when you are on the Write a post, you can add the canonical link of your website:
Medium #
Depending on what you write and how technical it is, you can submit it to one of the medium publications or just on medium under your name too. Medium is the top 86th website of the world right now, so if you craft your content, put in the right tags 1000s of views won’t be that hard to get on medium. I cross-post some of my content to ITNext, it has 30K followers at the time of writing this post. You can find more medium publications that would publish your content. These medium publications will have an editorial process, that will mean change in content and some lead time added before your content goes live. If you import a story on Medium it automatically adds the canonical link, else you can check it in story settings like below:
Hackernoon #
Hackernoon is also a very vibrant community of writers and readers. Being one of the top ~3200 websites in the world it also has lots of visitors. If our content stays long enough on the Hackernoon homepage, the content will garner sizeable views/reads. If you are not writing for Hackernoon check the writer section. It also has an editorial process where your content can be changed and usually, it task 4+ workdays for your content to be published on Hackernoon. You can add a canonical link to the post in the story setting section, First Seen At part like seen below:
HashNode #
Hashnode is another developer community similar to Dev.to. It also has many writers/bloggers writing content. You can start off with your own subdomain they have branded as devblog. As it is your own blog, there is no editorial process here. Hashnode is one of the top ~43500 websites in the world and has a very good amount of visitors. You can also read and participate in the communnitu on Hashnode. You can find the part to add canonical link at the bottom of write a story page at the “Is this a republished article?” section, like shown below:
Conclusion #
You can start blogging in any of the above platforms, I would suggest starting with HashNode as it gives you the ability to add your own domain. Then the same domain can be used to post your content and cross-post it to the other 3 websites.
If you repost content to more than one website, there will be a need to fix the images too. Do keep in mind the issues related to formatting as well. Markdown and copy-pasting are your friends :).
Happy tech blogging!