QUESTION:
“What is the impact on your blog rankings if you take some of the blog posts and repackage them as e-zine articles? Effectively, you are using the content twice. Will my blog rankings be penalized? If so, how much?” — Rob B.
ANSWER:
The duplicate content penalty is used by Google and other major search engines to control spam, but not entirely for the reason you are asking about. Here is what Google says on their webmaster blog:
“Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.”
The major search engines look for quality, unique content to list in their rankings. Their goal is to minimize the amount of duplicate content in their index so searchers do not get frustrated. If you include your blog posts on other sites, the search engines may choose to include the site with the most inbound links and may not include your blog in their index.
The solution is to not completely rely on duplicate content when trying to drive traffic to your blog. However, you don’t have to avoid duplicate content all together. If your goal is to have your blog rank high in the search engines, I would suggest to list some blog posts as articles, but not all of them.
If you want to avoid duplicate content, but still want to re-package your content, here are a couple of suggestions:
- Change the title of the blog post and rewrite at least the first couple of paragraphs, so it is not 100% duplicate.
- Instead of turning your blog post into an article, turn it into a video and/or PowerPoint presentation, optimize them with keywords, and submit them to the appropriate sites.
I hope this helps and thanks again for submitting your question.
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