Should you allow reposting?

Even professional copy writers are familiar with how intimidating a blank sheet of paper can be when you’re trying to create great content.  But, once that content has been produced and published, should you allow other people to repost your hard work?  What are the impacts from an SEO perspective?

I received a question from one of our agency partners this morning.  It went something like this…

One of our clients has a popular blog that relies significantly (but far from entirely) on contributed content, much of which is believed to be repurposed. They also get requests occasionally from people to repost content, and wondered if they should allow that, and to what extent.  What are your thoughts on best practices for repurposed content and how it affects SEO?

Complicated question.  Let’s break it down.

Contributed (and Probably Repurposed) Content

From an SEO perspective, this client ran a very popular, high-quality, high authority, multi-author blog so they should NOT get dinged by Google’s January 2014 announcement about contributed content blogs.  They’re good.

Next, we need to make sure the contributed content is high-quality.  Here’s my recommendation for a basic criteria for an acceptable contributed article:

1. Good Authors are Good Writers
Google the author to see if they’re publishing all sorts of spam out there; make sure they aren’t linking to spammy sites; look at how detailed their past content is.  Are they a good writer or just an author looking for links?

2. Watch Those Outgoing Links
As a general rule, author bios should contain no more than 2 (relevant) links.  Blog post should contain no more than 4 links per 2,000 words.

3. Content Should Be Unique
Authors who contribute a lot often re-use the same stuff over and over again. Consider running it through Copyscrape which identifies duplicate or similar content published online. This also protects you from plagiarism. Changing the headline and the first paragraph does not a unique article make. Your English teacher would fail you for that, wouldn’t she?

Does Contributed Content HAVE to be Unique?

If at all possible, the publisher should demand unique, never published anywhere else, content. If authors are asking to re-publish old articles on the publisher’s site, you should require at least 25% of the article be re-written or updated. You might even call out this fact with something like, “Back in 2011, I touched on this subject. Today, let’s deep-dive into how this affects today’s X Y Z…”

Should You Allow YOUR Content Be Re-published Elsewhere?

Deciding on whether you will allow visitors to re-publish your content on their websites is more up to you than Google.  The SEO impact either way is minimal, as you are the one who published the original and the re-published content should be seen as the duplicate.

Personally, I would allow my content to be republished as long as:

1. They asked my permission
2. The republisher wasn’t making money from ad revenue off my content
3. If not authored by me, I got the original author’s permission
4. If they credited the content (“This article originally published on…  and republished here with permission”)

By the way, I would link the words “with permission” to a page on how to get said permission.

If you’re just not comfortable with your content being republished, consider allowing (or even encouraging) “excerpts” of your content to be republished, but not the entire article. That’s a pretty fair middle ground.

Ask Around

As I said, whether to allow your content to be republished is more a case of personal preference than tried-and-true SEO best practice.  I’ve outlined my thoughts and recommendations, but don’t take my word for it.

Look closely at your favorite blogs and you’ll see most have a republishing policy outlined  somewhere and it’ll probably be fairly arbitrary.

Some don’t allow republishing at all–don’t even bother to ask for permission.

Some will allow it if you take the necessary steps to signal to search engines (such as cross-domain conical links, rel attributes, etc.) that it’s THEIR content and not yours.

Some will always say yes as long as you have the common courtesy to ask.