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csgeek
csgeek

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Crossposting

I'm curious what everyone's thought is on this topic.

I've heard in the past that cross posting content on different site is a horrible idea for SEO traffic. I find that most of my content will likely get more visibility by just being on dev.to or similar websites that have a natural audience for the content I create.

What does everyone think? Is it still a bad idea to post on 2-3 different places? Any recommended tools / platform?

Personally I love the dev.to community but also looking at:

  • Medium
  • SteemIt (or Hive)

What are some cool techie platforms for nerdy blogs that you're all familiar with?

Latest comments (2)

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sargalias profile image
Spyros Argalias

I'm not too sure unfortunately.

What I do know however is that if you're going to cross-post, I've heard that you should publish your article on your own website first and wait at least 2 weeks after Google has seen your article to establish it as the original content. You can also sign up at Google Search console and manually submit your article to be crawled, so you can be sure it's crawled ASAP.

In your cross-posts, the first link in your article should be a link back to the original article (on your site). Even better if the canonical URL can point to the post on your website. dev.to has a field for this. It's also possible to do on Medium, but you explicitly have to select the "Import a story" option rather than the "new story" option.

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csgeek profile image
csgeek

yeah, but here's the thing, SEO traffic will likely drive more traffic long term, but immediate engagement is almost always only going to be from the platform (dev.to).

I don't currently have a 'website' per say. I could setup a github.io type thing but honestly i enjoy the existing blogging platforms already that's why i'm on there. If I spend the time/effort to write a more detailed post like say a guide to IPV6 docker i'll post in 3 places for no other reason besides the fact that I think everywhere i posted i feel some people will benefit from it.

I know about the canonical URL, but not every platform supports that.

Thanks for the input though. Any thoughts and feedback is very much appreciated.