DEV Org Accounts: Tips for Reposting Blog Content

As many of you may already know, we provide a feature on DEV that allows you to create organizations, invite folks to join you in the org, and post articles under the org. For instance, if you look down the left side of my profile, you can see that I'm part of multiple orgs, including the DEV Team:

The DEV Team Follow

The team behind this very platform. 😄

There are loads of benefits to creating an org, many of which are listed on our Organization Info and FAQ Page — I recommend checking out that resource for a high-level view into what is possible with a DEV org.

Below, we'll zoom into a common use for many orgs on DEV: reposting content from an organization's blog onto DEV and we'll talk about the best practices to keep in mind when doing so.

Reposting an Org's Blog Content on DEV

There are loads of orgs out there with developer-focused blogs that have really interesting content. We absolutely encourage folks at these organizations to join up to DEV, create an org, and share their blog content with the community.

We provide tools that make it easy to import & share posts from an existing blog (as long as RSS is set up) and that make it safe to do so without the original post losing SEO (i.e. the DEV version should not overtake the original version in search rankings). Let's talk about each!

Importing Posts via RSS

Notably, there is a feature called "Publishing from RSS" thats allows you to easily import content onto DEV that exists elsewhere on the web so that it can be re-shared with the community.

This feature is found in settings (/settings/extensions) and gives you the ability to input an RSS Feed URL to import any articles that are added to the RSS. So, if your organization has a blog and y'all have set up RSS for it, y'all can continue to create articles on your blog first and import them onto DEV after; this way you only need to write the article in one spot, but can easily import and post it onto DEV without having to do the awkward copy/paste dance.

That said, note that this feature was built more with individuals in mind more so than organizations, so the flow is a little tricky for orgs (note: this request aims to make it easier). If you plan to use this method as an organization, you'll want to follow these steps:

Note: Currently you can only import a post into our Basic markdown editor; the Rich + markdown is not yet available.

1. In order for this to work, make sure that you have admin privileges for your org.
2. Enter the URL for your blog's RSS feed under "Publishing to DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 from RSS" here in your settings and click "submit feed settings".
3. After submitting the URL, go to your user dashboard. From here, click in to edit each of your org's posts one by one, and use the drop-down menu (top of the post) to set them all to be posted under your org, making sure to save each draft.
4. Go back to you user dashboard and use the drop-down menu toward the top right of the page to change from "Personal" to your org.
5. Go through the list of posts and click the three dots menu beside each title, then use the author drop-down menu to attribute the correct author in your org for each post.
6. You can then go through the posts, choosing which ones you'd like to publish. You can even publish on behalf of your team members if you'd like.

Two quick tips on sharing org blog content:

1. We recommend not posting all your articles at once, but instead slowly siphoning out a few per week — this will help with visibility of your content because the feed is unlikely to show a bunch of articles by one person at once. We also strongly recommend against posting articles that are purely promotional... as always, if your articles aren't in line with the Content Policy listed in our Terms, it's possible that we may remove your content and/or suspend your account.

2. When reposting via RSS, you have the option to check a box beside "mark the RSS source as canonical URL by default". If you're reposting content from elsewhere and worried about keeping the SEO ranking high for the original source, please check this box. More on that below...

The Importance of Specifying a Canonical URL

Often, organizations who are reposting content are worried about:
a) their original post becoming less discoverable in search engines
b) their website becoming less discoverable in search engines because the newer place that their content is published at (e.g. DEV) might overtake the first place that the article was published at (e.g. the org blog).

We really want folks to re-share their best posts on DEV and so give authors the ability to easily tell search engines where a reposted article originally came from by designating a canonical URL. So long as authors specify a canonical URL, then they shouldn't have to worry about getting penalized for reposting content. The search engine crawlers should see when a canonical URL has been set for a post via the HTML, and any attention given to the republished article on DEV should actually boost the original article's ranking.

All things said, SEO is a moving target and I'd always suggest keeping

How to Specify a Canonical URL

First off, if you are reposting via RSS, as mentioned earlier, you have the option to check a box beside "Mark the RSS source as canonical URL by default" upon import — if this is important to you and your org, be sure to do so!

That said, it's also possible to specify a canonical URL on individual posts you share too.

There are two different methods available depending upon what editor version you are on. Check to see which editor version you are using from /settings/customization.

If using Rich + markdown and reposting an article, you'll need to click the gear icon at the bottom of the page next to "Save draft". You'll then see an input for "Canonical URL" where you can share the URL for the original location of the post. This will tell search engine crawlers that the post first appeared on whatever URL you set it to be.

If using Basic markdown and reposting an article, you'll need to add canonical_url: X to the front matter of your post to specify where the post first appeared, like so:

---
title: ""
published: false
tags: 
canonical_url: https://mycoolsite.com/my-post
---

Wrap-up

We hope this helps to relieve some of the work and fears that come along with reposting content onto DEV. If you're an organization thinking about sharing your articles with our community, we hope you'll do so!

If you have any questions or feedback, don't hesitate to hit us up here!