You Ask, I Answer: Duplicate Content on Social Networks?

In today's episode, Travis asks, are there negative implications to publishing blog posts on LinkedIn that already exist on your site? You're probably thinking about the older SEO idea of duplicate content, uh, duplicate content penalties and things. Those have not existed for uh some time. What Google, Google in particular, does now is it evaluates content and decides which is the most authoritative version of all the versions that it can see. That means that generally speaking, as long as you've got content on your site and it's there first and your site is more authoritative than another site, uh, that it will generally choose your site.

Now, when it comes to social networks in particular, um, social networks like Facebook, like LinkedIn and stuff, are their content is non-public for the most part. Um if a piece of content is inaccessible uh without logging in, meaning that if you can see a Facebook post without logging in, if you can see a LinkedIn post without logging in, that could be problematic because from Google's perspective, these sites are larger and more credible. However, if the content is something that you post uh in a non-public way, so like a friends-only post on Facebook, something posted inside of a closed Facebook group, uh, a closed LinkedIn group, uh LinkedIn post on your profile, and uh it is not visible without logging in, then it's totally safe to do that. Um the easiest way to check, start up uh copy and paste the URL to your LinkedIn post, start up an incognito browser session or private browser session, paste that URL in and see if your post is accessible. If it says you should log in, you know the world is better with LinkedIn or whatever the promotional messages these days and and you can't see that post, totally fine.

So run a test to see if that is the case. Run a test on any of your content on those sites to make sure that you're in not intentionally posting things that are supposed to be private that are supposed to be restricted. Even some sites like I'm thinking of medium in particular support uh in their posting what's called the rel canonical feature meaning uh you can specify in a medium post hey this post originally appeared over on your company's blog and in in that case uh you are telling Google explicitly this is not the original this is not the most authoritative this is not the most credible go to this other link to do that and so that it would be uh totally safe to do one thing that people tend to do wrong whether or not uh we're talking about SEO implications is that if there are links in the original content uh either those links are not tagged correctly with UTM post uh with the UTM tracking codes or they've got older ones that if someone clicks on a link in the in the the the social network post will be miscategorized in the uh when the traffic comes to back to your website so for example, if there's a link um you know to your home page at the bottom of the article, and it's and it's for some reason has inherited an older tracking code that says it's from an email, and you put that up on LinkedIn and people click on it, that UTM tracking code will override where the traffic is coming from and mess up your tracking. So make sure that uh when you publish content on these other sites, either that they don't have any UTM tracking codes, or ideally, they have tracking codes that are unique to that site. So, for example, uh, if you were to copy and paste a blog post that had a link back to your homepage, the UTM tracking codes, the source would be LinkedIn, uh, the medium would be social, but you might even specify like a content code or a campaign code to say, hey, this is from uh my LinkedIn uh feed or this is from uh a LinkedIn group or something like that.

That way you are certain to be tracking correctly uh and giving credit to those efforts to be able to say this is where this comes from. This this traffic, this visitor, perhaps even this conversion, came from our efforts copying and pasting information onto LinkedIn. The only other negative implication that is possible in this situation is more of a human one, and it is that if you put everything, if you put all your your stuff on a social network, what is the incentive for the human to go and go to your website? If they know that it can be handed to them every day, do they really need to go to your website? And so the way around this is um at the bottom of your posts, you may want to keep a running uh little copyable block of text that says, Hey, did you enjoy this post?

Here are three more just like it or similarly related or more in-depth or whatever that go back to your website to try and pull that traffic away from LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever back to your website. Because at the end of the day, what you don't want to do is you don't want to have all of your eggs in one basket. You don't want to have uh people so in love with your LinkedIn profile, and then LinkedIn changes its algorithm or Facebook changes its algorithm, and all that effort and time you put into building up that profile, kind of you'll you lose that value, or you have to get out the credit card and start paying paying the piper. Generally speaking, make sure that there are calls to action in every piece of content that you post that sends people away from the social network back to something that you own your email list, your text messaging list, your website, uh, your blog, landing pages, downloads, something that you can use to capture information from that traffic and retain it in a format that you own, right? You own your email list, you own your text messaging list, you own your blog, you own the retargeting cookies.

Well, not you don't really own those, those those are advertiser provided. But those are things that you have, and they are not reliant on an algorithm to make sure that something you get in front of the people who have opted in to want to hear from you. So that would be the last more human negative implication. Make sure that you put good stuff on social networks, but not your best stuff, right? Put your best stuff on places that are yours, and so that once somebody gets there, they look around and go, Hey, this is a you know, it's like a restaurant.

Like you could set up a little pop up um on the sidewalk somewhere, and the food's pretty good, but then you say, Hey, go to the restaurant. And people go to the restaurant, they're like, Wow, this is this is you know, your your pop-up was good, but this is really nice. I'm gonna eat here. You want the same kind of reaction from people when they get to the media channels that you have control over. So, great question, Travis.

Important question: Duplicate content penalty doesn't exist anymore. It's just now search engines are choosing the most authoritative version. Make sure your website is the most authoritative. As always, please leave comments on the comments box below and subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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