Link rel="canonical"
I've noticed that many Steemians will copy articles from their blogs or other sources for use on SteemIt.
This creates two problems: The first is that @cheetah is likely to flag the post as potential plagiarism, which will reduce your upvote count.
The second problem is that that Google webcrawler might determine that SteemIt post is the original. Google will lower the page rank for your blog.
The best solution is avoid cutting and pasting content from your web site ... even when you own the content!!!!!
So, lets say you have a great article on your blog that you want to share on steem. The best path is to paraphrase the article with a link back to your blog.
This method has several advantages. It means that your SteemIt article is short and concise. The link to your web page adds legitimacy to your article and it brings web traffic to your web site.
As for the name of this post:
Back in 2009, Google finally recognized that were legitimate reasons for web sites to have duplicate content. To help sort out duplicate content, they introduced "canonical" linking.
So, lets say you have two copies of the same content on different pages. You can put a link tag in the header of the page with the attribute rel="canonical" and an href="" attribute to the source.
The Canonical tag tells Google not to index the current page. Google adds a little page rank to the referenced page.
This is a very useful tag for the small number of times when web sites need to have duplicate content. It should be used rarely.
Some self-proclaimed SEO-Experts have accidentally removed web sites from Google by placing the "link rel=canonical" on every page of a site.
Hackers can remove a site from Google by placing this link in the headers of a template.
Needless to say, SteemIt and other social networks won't let users put the rel="canonical" directive on their sites.
So, again the best solution is to paraphrase articles with links back to the source. A paraphrased article with a link back to your site will help establish your site as the canonical source.
There is actually only a very small number of times when you really need to copy and paste text online. When you copy and paste an article from your blog into SteemIt, you run the risk of Google deciding that SteemIt is the canonical source and that your blog is plagiarizing from SteemIt.
CREDITS: The photo of a Canon at Gettysburg. It is by flownaksala and is available through Big Stock Photo
Interesting! I was actually about to do this today.
What about the inverse? What if I copied the original from my blog to paste here, then resummarized on my blog and linked to steemit?
If the two sites are complimentary and are not exact duplicates; then both the search engines and users will like you.
In regards to links. Web designers should think about the way that traffic flows. People who are playing the SteemIt game are just jumping from link to link in steemit. The links I put on my posts are of little concern to them. They might click on a link to verify a reference, but will come back into SteemIt to continue playing the SteemIt game.
The links are for outside users who stumble on to my posts from a search engine. I want these users go to my blog where I can develop an idea in greater detail.
So, lets say there was an issue that I cared about. I would want to design links so that the links directed traffic to a decent page about the subject.
The easiest way to do this is with a hub and spoke design.
I see that you are using Blogger. Blogger has a feature that lets you create "pages." You can use this feature to create hubs on your blog. I just created a page with the url communitycolor.blogspot.com/p/steemit.html
At the top of this page I have a link to my SteemIt account.
I could write up a guide with pertinent observations about steemit. When I respond to new posts, I could link to my guide.
The flow is that people would click on the link, read my guide, then click back into my SteemIt home with my latest posts.
Since the page is off site. I can easily update as I learn new things about the platform.
If I put a bunch of links to my guide it might eventually show up on search engines. If I worked on this guide as a hub with numerous spokes, the guide would eventually get tens of thousand of hits. Who knows, the hub might eventually show up on search engines and get millions of hits.
NOTE: I haven't developed a guide (at least not yet). I am just providing an example about the way that people should think about links.
IMHO people should think about how traffic flows through sites. Since one only receives compensation in the first six days of a post. My inclination would be to design pages draws users onto a relevant page that I can keep fresh.
I rethought my last answer. If you had two articles that are about the same thing. The first is on your web site. The second is on SteemIt. it is not good to put a link from your web site to SteemIt and a link back to your site.
SteemIt puts the attribute rel="nofollow" on all outbound links. This directive tells Googlebot that the outbound link is suspect. So, if you had a follow link to SteemIt and SteemIt has a nofollow link back to you. Googlebot would interpret this to mean your primary site was spam.
You might do the following. Leave a link from your site to SteemIt for the first five days (when you can get upvotes), then remove it after five days.
PS, you may not have noticed but SteemIt and twitter seem to suffer from an excess of spam.
I meant to mention. SteemIt adds the attribute rel="nofollow noopener" to all outbound links. The nofollow directive tells Google that the link is potential spam.
So, if you had a robot that wrote a thousand comments with links to your web site. Google is likely to categorize your web site as spam.
Having a dozen nofollow links into a web page is considered normal. Having thousands of inbound links with nofollow tags is a good indication of spam.
The nofollow tag reduces spam, but it has a side effect.
What appears to happen is if I created a web page; then created a steemit post with a link back to the source. Google would interpret the nofollow tag to mean that SteemIt was the source and that my web site was the copy.
But if you paraphrased your steemit post, Google is more likely to recognize your web site as the original source.
Some great points here. I googled this to find the answer regarding canonical directives.
Do you think it is completely unwise to link to your external sites or blogs then? If not playing the steemit game and merely having the external links in the footer for example, you could create some decent outbound links for which "genuine" users could refer to.
This hub and spoke you spoke of... Is this where you'd have a cornerstone piece of content such as "the a-z of steemit" and then you'd create content linking to the subcategories all around it?
Thanks
Mitch
"So, if you had a robot that wrote a thousand comments with links to your web site. Google is likely to categorize your web site as spam."
If this was true, I could just put my competitor's website links in the comments and have their site labeled as spam. They would just be ignored.
SteemIt is now using rel="noopener noreferrer" in links. They do this to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. Unfortunately, the noreferrer directive means that your links never show up in analytic reports.
Links from SteemIt posts get the PR associated with the posts. I think google is good at recognizing the spam links dropped by robots as they usually have the same text in each post.
I'm not sure if STEEMit has remedied this in the year or so since this post was made, I'd heard something about STEEM allowing canonical links recently, but I only started looking into it now..
And came across this post! So for others who may have found this post looking for the same topic:
Linking outside of STEEM will hurt your readership/earnings for your STEEM blog.. People who follow you on STEEM most likely want to stay within STEEM when browsing content, I think it is way better to just duplicate the post on STEEM..
To avoid plagurism, just put a line in your footer that says "Originally posted to [url], cross-posted to STEEM [date]"
-shrugs-