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.