Repurposing content is a crucial part of any excellent online marketing strategy. However, quite a few marketers new to the content game often mix-up repurposing with reposting (as a matter of fact, there are a number of editorial professionals who do the same, as well). Understanding the difference, however, is important to delivering a positive reader experience and building trust with potential buyers and search engines at the same time.
- Repurposed content – This is when you produce multiple content items from only one singular asset.
- Reposted content – Also known as “duplicate” content, this commonly refers to any time similar content items are posted several times under the same domain.
Reposting content is a poor practice for quite a number of reasons, but most notably since it creates a bad reader experience. Nobody would like to go to a website and discover many pages that are precisely the same, and even more importantly, neither does Google. If the search engine police flag your site for duplicate content, it could severely harm your page rank value. (Note: There are no actual search engine police, merely Google’s mysterious algorithm –which is even more scary.)
So where does the confusion come into all this?
While by common definition, duplicate content refers to items living under the same domain, a far more frequent and misread practice involves reposted or duplicate content published across either A) many websites hosted by the same company, or B) external websites aside from your own.
Let’s start with the former. In a content marketing strategy, a company may host a number of websites: a main corporate site, a separate blog site, or even multiple content sites dedicated to particular subject areas (more prevalent in larger organizations). In an effort to enhance content volume, the organization might repost an article published on one of its websites to every other website in its portfolio. (Note: this is not limited to content marketing. I know of one well-known online publishing company that hosts many sites and publishes duplicate content throughout all of them. Which begs the question, why not just have one website and be done with it?
Some may well look at this as merely repurposing content from one site to another, but the practice is actually against the true spirit of repurposing. With repurposed content, the idea is to develop several pieces of unique content from the same asset. This could possibly be in the form of:
- a multipart article series
- an article and companion podcast
- a Q&A video with the audio published separately as a podcast, and with an article based on the content or transcription of the interview
There are tons of examples, but you get the idea.
But wait – isn’t that all still merely the very same thing? Yes and no. As Thomas Clifford wrote up lately for the Content Marketing Institute, not everyone consumes data the same way. Reliably repurposing content in different formats like this can in fact be a wonderful practice that will increase the popularity of your website.
Repurposing with external sites, however, is a tiny bit difficult. For example, there are scenarios where an article that was originally posted on your site could appear in its entirety elsewhere (whether through content syndication or even straight-up theft). While this type of “duplicate content” was once feared to carry a heavy search penalty (not actually true), it can still have a detrimental effect on traffic.
As for me, I generally try to stick to the following: everything you post should be as distinctive to your website as possible. While syndication can draw attention to your company and even help supply backlinks for SEO value, it also gives readers a reason not to take a look at your company’s website. Even if your tactic entails submitting posts to article directories, you should still change the text to make them unique.
A better syndication practice? Write something distinctive for those other external sites! Not only will you get better value, but if the site in question is affiliated with a thought leader or well-liked online personality, you boost the chance that they may write something unique for you as well.
I’d like to make one last point about SEO here. While having your write-up appear on multiple sites won’t “technically” get you penalized in search, it will force Google to decide which version of the content is the “right” one to list in its rankings — and there’s no assurances it will pick yours. Remember, Google is all about providing a good reader experience, so give it what it wants – lots of great, original content!
Brendan Cournoyer works to bring editorial concepts to OpenView’s content marketing initiatives.
Related articles
- Simple but Proven SEO Practices to Help Your Online Business (understandingecommerce.com)
- SEO Mistakes You Should Stay Away From (plusstuff.com)
- Is Syndicated Content Duplicate Content? (searchenginejournal.com)
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