Reposting Your Old Posts HURTS Your Blog
Let me explain WHY with an analogy…
Imagine you’re back in school (if you’re not in school anymore), it’s Midterms season, and you have a huuuuuge take-home essay due in a few days. The paper is for your Poli Sci class and it’s about whether we should adopt a monarchy and why/why not.
Then you have an epiphany: “I wrote a paper about that exact same thing for my Business class a while back and got an A. Yeah, it was about how monarchies make it more difficult for businesses to operate*. So I’ll just reuse that!”
* Don’t know if this is true or not, but just follow along for this analogy’s sake :).
And you do reuse it. Sure, you change a handful of things here and there, but basically it’s the exact. same. paper.
A few days after you submit it, you get an official-looking email from your university and your prof stating that you’ve cheated, plus all the ramifications that follow and yada yada…
OH “%€¥#&$+#=,” you think to yourself. “They found out.”
Now let’s go back to you, your blog, and the Interwebs: You/your blog’s author(s) represent(s) well, the student, the star of the story ^above^, your blog and your old posts represent that paper you had aced (b/c lets face it, you’re a wonderful blogger!), and blogland/the Internet represent the prof AND the school.
Now one of my profs called reusing assignments “cheating off yourself.” I’m not 100% sure whether my school frowns upon it (since it does come it handy on occasion) but the point of the story is: The Internet DOES penalize you for recycling/reusing/REPOSTING your old posts–as harmless as it is.
And the reason why you’ll get penalized is because you (i.e., your blog) will be considered SPAM. Yuck. Not good.
You see, Google, the reigning king of the Internet, pretty much determines who’s worthy of appearing on the Internet. Yup, Google. So when Google sees that your site features duplicate content (regardless of whether it’s yours or someone else’s), it’ll think it’s just like those innumerable sites whose sole purpose is to litter Google’s home.
So Google penalizes those sites by either having them rank WAY lower in search results or kicking them off its home (i.e., search results) completely.
But what if you have a really cool post that performed very well the first time around?
For the love of blogland, DONT REPOST IT. Simple as that. If you want more/new eyes to look at it, just do either or both of these things:
1) Promote it like crazy (again): Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, etc. will be your best buddies for this step. Just make sure to promote it at least three times and at DIFFERENT times so that it gets the attention it deserves from as many different pairs of eyes as possible.
2) Take that post’s link plus other links from stuff you’ve enjoyed (not your stuff! You don’t want to promote yourself TOO much here), and run like a “Link Love”-type of post. That way, you’re just linking to that post and not copying it entirely, because that’s bad… (But before you do this, you might want to learn how to link to stuff the right way.)
There you have it!! Just say no: Don’t repost your old posts. Instead of reposting, promote them again and/or link to them in newer posts… >> Way easy!
Do YOU repost old content? Will you stop after reading this :)? Let me know what else you think or if you have any Qs and thanks for stopping by!!
