Where do you host your content? Is it on your own site, or on third-party platforms like Medium and LinkedIn? If you're not yet thinking about the ramifications of using hosted blog platforms for your content versus your own site, now's your chance to start. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the boons and pitfalls of using outside websites to distribute and share your content.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about blog platforms, places like Medium, Svbtle — that's Svbtle with a V instead of a U — Tumblr, LinkedIn, places where essentially you've got a hosted blog platform, a hosted content platform. It's someone else's network. You don't have to set up your own website, but at the same time you are contributing content to their site.
This has become really popular, I think. Look, Medium and LinkedIn are really the two big ones where a lot of folks are contributing these days. LinkedIn very B2B focused, Medium very startup, and new media as well as new creative-focused.
So I think, because of the rise of these things, we're seeing a lot of people ask themselves, "Should I create my own content platform? Do I need to build a WordPress hosted subfolder on my website? Or can I just use Medium because it has all these advantages, right?" Well, let me try and answer those questions for you today.
So, what do hosted platforms enable?
Well, it's really simple to sign up and start creating on them. You plug in your name, email, a password. You don't have to set up DNS. You don't have to set up hosting. You can start publishing right away. That's really easy and convenient.
It also means that, for a lot of marketers, they don't have to involve their engineering or their web development teams. That's pretty awesome, too.
There are also built in networks on a lot of these places, Medium in particular, but Svbtle as well. Tumblr quite obviously has a very, very big network. So as a result, you've got this ability to gain followers or subscribers to your content, someone that can say like, "Oh, I want to follow @randfish on Medium." I haven't published on Medium, but for some reason I seem to have thousands of followers there.
So I think this creates this idea like, "Hey, I could reach a lot more people that I wouldn't necessarily be able to reach on my own platform, because it's not like these people are all subscribed to my blog already, but they are signed up for Medium or LinkedIn, which has hundreds of millions of worldwide users."
There's also an SEO benefit here. You inherit domain authority. On Medium and on LinkedIn in particular, these can be really powerful. Medium is a domain authority 80. LinkedIn is a domain authority of 99, which is no surprise. Pretty much every website on the planet links to their LinkedIn page. So you can imagine that these pages have the potential to do really well in Google's rankings, and you don't necessarily have to point a lot of links at them in order for them to rank very well. We've seen this. Medium has been doing quite well in the rankings. LinkedIn articles are doing quite well in their niches.
This is a little different, a subtle but important difference for Svbtle itself, for Tumblr, and for WordPress. These are on subdomains. So it would be, yes, there are lots of people who are using WordPress, although that's very customizable. But you could imagine that if I got randstshirts.wordpress.com or randstshirts.tumblr.com or randstshirt.svbtle.com, that doesn't have the same ranking ability. That subdomain means that Google considers it separately from the main domain. So you're not going to inherit the ranking benefit on those. It's really Medium and LinkedIn where that happens. To be honest, Google+ as well, we've seen them ranking like a Medium or a LinkedIn too.
You also have this benefit of email digests and subscriptions, which can help grow your content's reach. For those of you who aren't subscribed to Medium, they send out a daily digest to all of the folks who are signed up. So if you are someone who is contributing Medium content, you can often expect that your subscribers through Medium may be getting your stuff through an email digest. It may even get broadcast to a much broader group, to people who aren't following you but are following them. If they've "hearted" your content on Medium, they'll see it. So you get all these network effects through email digests and email subscriptions too.
So what's the downside?
This is pretty awesome. To me, these are compelling reasons to potentially consider using these. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's talk about the downside as well. To my mind, these downsides prevent me from wanting to encourage certain types of views. I'll talk about my best advice and my tactical advice for using these in a sec.
Links authority and ranking signals that are accrued. We recognize that you put a post on Medium, a lot of times posts there do very well. They get a lot of traction, a lot of attention. They make it into news feeds. Other sites link to them. Other pages around the web link to them. It's great. Lots of social shares, lots of engagement. That is terrific.
Guess what? Those benefits accrue only to Medium.com. So every time you publish something there and it gets lots of links and ranking signals and engagement and social and all these wonderful things, that helps Medium.com rank better in the future. It doesn't help yoursite.com rank better in the future.
You might say, "But Rand, I've got a link here, and that link points right back to my site." Yes, wonderful. You now have the equivalent of one link from Medium. Good for you. It's not a bad thing. But this is nowhere near the kind of help that you would get if this piece of content had been hosted on your site to begin with. If this is hosted over here, all these links point in there, and all those ranking benefits accrue to your site and page.
In some ways, from an SEO perspective, especially if you're trying to build up that SEO flywheel of growing domain authority and growing links and being able to rank for more competitive stuff, if you're trying to build that flywheel, you'd almost say, "Hey, you know what, I'd take half the links and ranking signals if it were on my own site. That would still be worth more to me than more on Medium."
Okay. But that being said, there are all the distribution advantages, so maybe we're still at a wash here.
Also on these blogging platforms, these hosted platforms, there's no ownership of or ability to influence the UI and UX. That is a tough one too. So one of the wonderful things about blogging is — and we've seen this over the years many times at Moz. People come to Moz to read the content, they remember Moz, and they have a positive association and they say, "Yeah, you know, Moz made me feel like they were authorities, like they knew what they were talking about. So now I want to go check out Moz Local, their product, or Moz Analytics, or Open Site Explorer, or whatever it is."
That's great. But if you are on Medium or if you are on Svbtle or if you are on WordPress — well, WordPress is more customizable — but if you're on Google+, the experience is, "Oh, I had a really good experience with Medium." That's very, very different. They will not remember who you are and how you made them feel, at least certainly not to the extent that they would if you owned and controlled that UI and UX.
So you're really reducing brandability and any messaging opportunities that you might have had there. That's dramatically, dramatically reduced. I think that's very, very tough for a lot of folks.
Next up — and this speaks to the UI and UX elements — but it's impossible to add or to customize calls to action, which really inhibits using your blog as part of your funnel. Essentially, I can't say, "Hey, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to add a button right below here, below all my blog posts that says, 'Hey, sign up to try our product for free,' or, 'Get on our new mailing list,' or, 'Subscribe to this particular piece of content.' Or I want to put something in the sidebar, or I'd like to have it in the header. Or I want to have it as a drop over when someone scrolls halfway down the page." You can't do any of those things. That sort of messaging is controlled by the platform. You're not allowed to add custom code here, and thus your ability to impact your funnel with your blog or with your content platform on these sites is severely limited. You can add a link, and yes, people can still follow you on these networks, but that is definitely not the same.
There's also, frustratingly, for a lot of paid marketers and a lot of marketers who know that they can do this, you can't put a retargeting pixel on Svbtle or on Medium. Actually, you may be able to on Svbtle now. I'm not sure if you can. But Medium for sure, LinkedIn for sure, Google+, you can't say, "Hey, all the people who come to my posts on Medium, I'd like to retarget them and remarket to them as they go around the web later, and I'll follow them around the Internet like a lost puppy dog." Well, too bad, not possible. You can't place that pixel. No custom code, that's out.
The last thing, and I think one of the most salient points, is there have been many, many platforms like this over the years. Many people use the example of GeoCities where a lot of people hosted their content and then it went away. In the early days of the web, it was very big, and a few years ago it fell apart.
It's not just that, though. The uncertain future could mean that in some time frame, in the months or years to come, Medium, or Svbtle, or LinkedIn, or Google+ could become more like Facebook, where instead of 100% of the people seeing the content that they subscribe to, maybe they only see 10% or the Facebook averages today, which are under 1%. So this means that you don't really know what might happen to your content in the future in terms of its potential visibility to the audience there. If that's the sole place you're building up your audience, that is a high amount of risk depending on what happens as the platform evolves.
This is true for all social platforms. It's not just true for these hosted blog content platforms. Many folks have talked about how Twitter in the future may not show 100% of the content there. I don't know how real that is or whether it's just a rumor, but it's one of those things to consider and keep in mind.
My best advice:
So my best advice here is, use platforms like these for reaching their audiences. I think it can be great to say, "Hey, 1 out of every 10 or 20 posts I want to put something up on Medium, or I want to test it on Google+, or I want to test it on LinkedIn because I think that those audiences have a lot of affinity with what I'm doing. I want to be able to reach out to them. I want to see how those perform. Maybe I want to contribute there once a month or once a quarter." Great. Wonderful. That can be a fine way to draw distribution there.
I think it's great for building connections. If you know that there are people on those networks who have big, powerful followings and they're very engaged there, I think using those networks like you would use a Twitter or a Facebook or like you already use LinkedIn to try and build up those connections makes total sense.
Amplifying the reach of existing content or messages. If you have a great piece of content or a really exciting message, something exciting you want to share and you've already put some content around that on your own site and now you're trying to find other channels to amplify, well, you might want to think about treating Medium just like you would treat a post on Twitter or a post on Facebook or a post on LinkedIn. You could instead create a whole piece of content around that, sort of like you would with a guest post, and use it to amplify that reach.
I think guest post-style contribution, in general, is a great way to think about these networks. So you might imagine saying, "Hey, I'd love to contribute to YouMoz," which is Moz's own guest blogging platform. That could be wonderful, but you would never make that your home. You wouldn't host all your content there. Likewise you might contribute to Forbes or Business Insider or to The Next Web or any of these sites. But you wouldn't say that's where all my content is going to be placed. It's one chance to get in front of that audience.
Last one, I think it's great to try and use these for SERP domination. So if you say, "Hey, I own one or two of the top listings of the first page of results in Google for this particular keyword, term, or phrase. I want to use Medium and LinkedIn, and I'm going to write two separate pieces targeting similar keywords or those same keywords and see if I can't own 4 slots or 5 slots out of the top 10." That's a great use of these types of platforms, just like it is with guest posting.
Don't try to use these for...
Don't try to use these as your content's primary or, God forbid, only home on the web. Like I said, uncertain future, inability to target, inability of using the funnel, just too many limitations for what I think modern marketers need to do.
I don't think it is wise, either, to put content on there that's what I'd call your money keywords, essentially stuff that is very close to the conversion funnel, where you know people are going to search for these things, and then when they find this content, they're very likely to make their next step a sign-up, a conversion. I would urge you to keep that on your site, because you can't own the experience. I think it's much wiser if you say, "Hey, let's look way up in the funnel when people are just getting associated with us, or when we're trying to bring in press and PR, or we're trying to bring in broad awareness." I think those are better uses.
I think it's also very unwise to make these types of platforms the home of your big content pieces, big content pieces meaning like unique research or giant visuals or interactive content. You probably won't even be able to host interactive content at most of these.
If you have content that you know is very likely to drive known, high-quality links, you've already got your outreach list, you're pretty sure that those people are going to link to you, please put that content on your own site because you'll get the maximum ranking benefits in that fashion. Then you could potentially put another piece of content, repurpose a little bit of the information or whatever it is that you've put together that's wonderful in terms of big content as another piece that you separately broadcast and amplify to these audiences.
What I'm really saying is treat these guys — Medium, Svbtle, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Google+ — treat them like these guys, like you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and guest hosts in general. It's a place to put a little bit of content to reach a new audience. It's a way to amplify a message you already have. It's not the home of content. I think that's really what I urge for modern marketers today.
All right, everyone. Look forward to the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Rand, this is a great topic! Earlier this year, I published a Moz essay on the related issue how to approach owned and earned media and just wanted to summarize my personal thoughts here for those who might be interested.
1. Publishing somewhere else is great for your short-term marketing goals that relate to PR, publicity, and brand awareness.
Say that my company sells widgets and no one in the widget industry knows about us. Well, I can publish a by-lined article or perhaps even get news coverage on websites and publications that are read by people who sell widgets.
Such a tactic increases brand awareness immediately -- and can also be used in conjunction with advertising and other similar approaches -- because those websites will spread the content throughout and across their existing channels and audiences. This is especially useful when your own followings and subscribers are low in number.
In short, publish stuff on third-party platforms and other websites for your "outbound marketing" goals because LinkedIn, Medium, can give a huge boost to your brand awareness because they already have the audiences and the huge reach.
2. Publishing on your own domain is great for your long-term marketing goals that relate to SEO, social media, and inbound marketing in general.
Is your article, guide, or anything else targeting a specific search query? Why would you give that material to someone else? Put it on your domain, and you'll see long-term benefits over time as (hopefully) your rankings increase over the long term as you build a quality brand.
Plus, the more that you publish on your website, the more that you'll attract visitors -- and some percentage of those visitors will become leads or customers, follow you on social media, subscribe to e-mail newsletters, and so on. It's a big funnel.
In short, publish on your own domain in the context of your "inbound marketing" goals.
Just some thoughts -- thanks for addressing this topic, Rand!
Yes! Loved your post Samuel - thanks for leaving it here and reminding us all. I'm in total agreement with you on those 2 points.
Hi Rand, I'm a relative newbie to the Whiteboard Friday series, but now a complete addict! This week was one of the best I've seen... so simple and easy to implement. Thank you!
@Rand Fishkin: I do this little trick... Add content to the owner's website, going to google.com/webmaster/tools/ and ask google to crawl/index that new original content. Then they can go out and add that content to other sites/blogs. The key is getting it indexed first before letting other sites have it. :-)
Yeah, making sure your version of the content is the first to be indexed can help, but I'd warn against thinking that's a silver bullet. We've seen plenty of instances where the first indexed version isn't necessarily the ones Google views as canonical or ranks consistently above the others. My advice would still be to put up original content on these platforms that reference back to your work on your own site, rather than simply copying+pasting.
Rand,
Totally agree... you've gotta keep an extra nugget of info for your own page.
I think everything that was covered here was spot on information. The one thing I would like to point out is that on LinkedIn, if you post on Pulse, there is an added potential benefit that your post could be selected to be promoted by LinkedIn. If your post is selected to be promoted, your information could be seen by an exponentially much larger audience, possibly even in the hundreds of thousands of viewers. Of course, if you are not one of the "influencers" on LinkedIn, it may be rather hard to do this.
One thing that helps considerably to accomplish this feat is a large network. If you have more than 10k 1st level connections, you are way ahead of the game. Your post on Pulse automatically goes out to all of your 1st level connections, and you stand a much greater chance of a Pulse promotion that could rocket your post to a significant part of the huge LinkedIn audience. That is why I have implemented a strategy to grow my network to this level within one year from now. Anyone can do this with the right strategy and 10-15 minutes per day on LinkedIn.
Hi Rand,
This edition is best one i will say, the reason is many folks relaying on these type of content sharing medium knowing less benefits and downsides. I don't personally see the huge and long term effect of these medium base sharing. The reason, as you rightly mentioned these sites will get the best results and referrals links etc. And Author will miss all this. Moreover, these medium base site can decide to take down the site when you may doing good. Where as, if its self hosted site then its complete discretion remains to author.
You mention that you would inherit domain authority from a large domain like Medium. But looking at some Medium posts- all of their external links are no-follow. Would value be passed in another way?
Thank you!
Thanks Rand especially about G+...I was told many years ago to re-do my blogging because of the way I posted and I am glad to know it still holds true. Keep your good content close...and on your own website.
Nailed it Rand as always!! P.S. I follow you on Medium lol, just in case. :)
Hi Rand,
Thanks for such an informative article as always !!
The whiteboard image is self-explanatory and your views about how and when to use hosted blog platforms is clearly depicted...I also agree to your views and will follow your footsteps in this digital marketing world..
Mr. Fishkin you always post great content, thanks alot for sharing this. Insightful!
Hi Rand,
Good and courageous insight indeed. Most of us have a herd mentality, we do not want to be left out and we keep contributing our content to social media networks to make them successful. Courageous blog by you because, you are able to rationalize it against the tide and for larger good of marketers.
Thanks for the blog.
Jit@MyTechLogy
Did not find a way to add even one dofollow link on medium.com. So you really have to do it for the exposure.
my tests with links on medium
WOW! I am very impressed! This was an awesome post. Love the whiteboard graphic too! Such great information that I can't wait to share out to my followers. Thank you!
Hi Rand,
Nice Article!!! thanks for sharing
Yes, Of course, third Party Blogs and Social Media Sites are good medium to get permanent traffic and get High Authority blog Backlinks.
End of The Day Backlink matters...!!!
I think that you underestimate power of authority and sharing knowledge with others with "backlinks". All platforms above are high authority but they have strict rules for use. One strike and you're out.
If you're nice then this platforms can give you power to share information that can't fit on your blog. Like if you manage startup then you can share some article in 3rd party platform about "growth hacking" for example. You can't share this article there because audience is different. But for Medium this is perfect content for them. And for you too.
So main goal isn't "building backlinks". It should be "let's share some insider information and tricks to make other people life easier". This will give you enough credits as person so you can later connect with other peoples. And this is point where "miracle happens" - you can receive much more audience than before.
So think wise and don't trade off some short term goals vs. long term ones.
Totally agree with Peter here. The links you might get from LinkedIn Pulse or from Medium or the others will provide a small amount of value, but compared to blogging on your own site and earning ALL the links back to the content there, it's probably a net loss (and definitely, as Peter notes, a loss in the long term).
This is the same principle as guest blogging - if you're blogging solely for the links, guest posts from high quality places are going to reject you and the low quality ones could get you into trouble with Google.
Rand, wouldn't a lot of the issues that you bring up regarding site authority and backlinks be circumvented by using custom domains? I'm asking because Medium does seem to claim so in it's last FAQ here but I'm not so sure and it doesn't seem to be addressed anywhere else.
This is complete guide of how to use blogs platforms in SEO. Full information and valuable also.
Hi Rand,
As usual again seems a great post, You Rocked Rand.This is how modern marketers are going and moving forward.I personally like linked In articles are a great way.Thanks Keep sharing.
Rand：
sorry I have to ask this question as a starter in SEO .
I'm a starter and I acquire all the knowledge about SEO from internet blog .I've been reading MOZ blog for 3 months.
Except reading blogs on internet , what should I do to improve my SEO skills?
or is it enough that I just read on internet and practice with my daytime job?
as I know , practice is always the most important thing in the marketing field
Hi Rand,
I have one question that, if I publish one content on my blog and share the title and first paragraph on the self hosted blog and pest a link of my own site at the end to read the complete article, do you think it’s a good idea ?
Great Video and explanation and certainly giving me food for thought. I wonder if the value of these links have now changed though, since all of the updates and changes in some of the platforms. For instance, tumblr has really diluted their link juice now.
Hey Rand
Thanks for WBF
Your WBF For this week already curated on tumblr
https://ginavanderhamco.tumblr.com/post/134048859750/how-to-use-hosted-blog-platforms-for-seo-amp
Rand i like your unique topic, but i have a question which is that. whenever i share my content if website having good authority and PR with these sort of things peoples couldnt come to see my content. also its horribe to see that the statistics having null summary.
Excellent article, social networks are very important to reach a larger audience, they should be considered as additional tools.
I think our valuable content should always be published on our websites.
You mentioned don't use tumblr. But what if we mapped the tumblr to our own domain such as https://blog.usetrove.com is that considered hosted or not?
Good tips as always. I've struggled with this myself but it's about balancing what's important to your business/brand. If you're looking to growth hack traffic and exposure, Medium and LinkedIn are great platforms to do that. Long term growth and brand building is best to publish on your own site, do the link outreach, build SEO equity, brand awareness and of course, conversions.
I just use LinkedIn and Medium as syndication platforms. I generally use them to reignite a past post I did (guest posts too!) about 4 months later. It helps to reach new audiences and maximize your content as well.
Great topic you've touched on, Rand.
I think many novice SEOs and Web Marketers are a bit confused on how to distribute specific piece of content. In my opinion, the biggest confusion that beginners face is whether to distribute the same piece of content across different channels, i.e. blogging platforms. I think the concentration should be directed to one source - your website. In other words, the thing that has to be promoted is the "link" (with a short description) to that specific content on your website. Of course, it does not mean that you should only publish content on your website. Once or twice a month you can produce content for external websites or platforms.
Great post! Was exactly what I needed. I'm currently just starting out and looking at starting blogging. In this situation with my website being fairly minimal and incomplete, I think I'll be doing most my blogging on other platforms to begin with. Once I'm a bit more up and running in my own business I might migrate some stuff over.
Rand, pretty cool blog post indeed. I took a look at the Medium and i thought Folks are using it for buildings links on it as it allows to make as many links on the words as you want. I really like the second half of your post. need to have those points in mind when working on Medium and LinkedIn. Thanks again for the great Post!!
Hey Rand, How are you? it's a great post I must say, Content sharing to community sites are just like giving your own cup of team to others..
What I feel, if you build your connection, audience will come every hour...
Superb!!
This is the best time to change content marketing strategy and post distribution.In this blog post Rand nicely described about it.and read complete blog its very nice and knowledgeable topic for every SEO Marketer .I really like your way of presentation including video .
I really love Whiteboard Fridays, as they add a lot of perspective. Thank you for sharing Rand.
But what would be the best advice for cases in which blogging on the hosted platform has already been going on for a while, up to the point that it has valuable authority?
My challenge is that I have myblog.wordpress.com URL with good authority (95/100), and I am currently researching the best way to leverage that in order to drive conversions on my site (which has 22 authority on the Moz scale). That is how I found this particular WBF. I would love to hear any suggestions from this community (301 redirects? canonical tags? leave it as it is?).
For some time now, Medium allows you to setup up your own domain for publications. Does that eliminate the major downside you've mentioned? (regarding SEO linking and ranking ability). I'm using this setup as my primary blogging platform but after reading Your post I'm a bit confused (not sure, if I should to continue...)
Thank for great post!
It doesn't eliminate the downsides as you still can't control the UI/UX or the ability to do retargeting, etc. But certainly it creates less of a barrier/impediment.
Hello Rand,
Its a great post about content marketing. But i have a question about content marketing. My question is I post a content on Medium or Linkedin, Can i post the same content to post on other website like wordpress, tumblr, and other platform?
I would seriously not recommend that. You can certainly post a link to your original content, and even include a short summary or sample, but duplicating entire articles on multiple sites is generally a bad idea.
Great Article! Though posting in places like Pulse and Medium are good to reach a bulk audience, blogging on your own website is probably the best solution for the long term.
Informative post! Normally, when I write a blog it's for my website. The reason why I post my blogs to my website only is because of the SEO impact. A good blog answering questions about a specific topic can go a long ways when it comes to SEO.
First, a blog posted to your website helps adds to the size of your website. This is a SEO ranking factor and we all know Google believes bigger is better.
Second, if your blog content is great, you can easily rack up some backlinks by sharing your blog through the social networks. I wrote a "How to" blog about AdWords PPC and I shared it a few times in facebook, twitter and linkedIn and I gained 40 backlinks.
In my opinion, blogging and Guest posting are the way to go after your On-Site and Off-site SEO is up to par.
Please give this post a thums up if you like it. :)
Epic Interactive Media Inc.
Good tips as always.
Thanks friend i am already searching these type of information on internet and just find here. I feel you are a best teacher and teach all methods with great communication. Can u explain how i increase my website Page Rank with next post
Hi Rand & Klygo
When add that content to other sites/blog, Can we add canonical tag on Free Hosted blog ( wordprss, medium) of our Main website.?
Conceivably, yes. You'll still lose the ability to control the UX/cookies/retargeting for visitors to those hosted versions, but the SEO value will pass over - it's a reasonable approach as I noted in the post.
Hi Rand,
Great article! I'd like to know whether a custom domain name on Svbtle count as a sub-domain, or would it have any benefits in ranking on Google?
Thanks!
Let's assume someone has a blog where their end-goal is solely to get people to view their content. With that in mind, do you believe it would be beneficial to re-publish content on these 3rd-party blogging platforms? It gets it in-front of more eyes but then there's the potential negative impact of having duplicate content on the web.
Wasn't here on WBF for some time and (finally!) I can zoom WBF image!
Awesome stuff! I'm relatively new to the SEO world, but I find myself using WBF and the Moz Blog as great resources!
Great video Rand and extremely well explain. When teaching my students I like to say to treat hosted blogging platforms as the place to publish "movie trailers" or "teasers" that links to their HERO content pieces that should live on their own website.
Rand,
I totally agree. In my opinion having content that I have written on my own website is one of the most valuable things I have as an SEO (next to my mind.. Yet still debateble). It is definetly more beneficial having the majority of my content on my website opposed to other websites because 1. it's much harder to monetize, 2. My site isn't getting updated with fresh content, and 3. I'm losing the ability to rank my site for keywords. Of course there are more reasons like interlinking to other parts of my site, driving conversions, ect. but thats plenty enough for me to keep putting the majority of my content on my website!
Great advice i didnt know the difference....
Hi Rand,
Some people prefeer to make more big his own blog, usually we dont have so much time to make contents for other plataforms, satellite blogs, or guest blogging.
Its sad, but if you have a few recourses you have to choose priority.
Great one, this Friday. :)
Anyway, if I may I would like just to add something regarding disadvantages you mentioned. If your post on, lets say Linkedin, gets lot of attention, social shares, and engagement, I guess it won't benefit only to Linkedin. It will make that post page, stronger in the eyes of Google, for sure. And then, your link or mentioning or whatever connection that post have with your website, will become more valuable for your website SEO, too. I guess you meant about less value then self hosted blog and that's right, just if you want link from post on Linkedin, it will be more valuable if that post gets more attention.
Yeah - you can certainly use these platforms with high DA to do some Barnacle SEO. I'd just say that all the drawbacks of a non-customizable/owned platform still apply, and you'll lose the benefits of being able to control the experience when searchers do land on that page. If that's a loss you're willing to take in exchange for the ranking ability or the ability to have multiple pages ranking in the same SERP, go for it.
Agree. And my idea was just to use that platforms occasionally, not as main platform, of course. Thanks for pointing to Barnacle SEO, somehow I skipped that video. :)
Btw, unrelated, I just realized today is exactly 10 years since I'm member of (SEO)moz. Lovin it here. :)
Congrats! I've only been here 11 years myself, so that's amazing :-)
Great article, thanks for sharing this. It´s something to follow.
Hey, Belated Thanks Giving.. And as always Great Topic Well Explained. Working on these simple things.. really helps in SEO..
Hi Rand
Belated Happy Thanksgiving Day!!
This week WBF was totally for someone like me. These days, I am more on Medium.com, it's a great platform for sharing content and of course boosting our SEO practices.
Points mentioned by you about amplifying our present content and guest post through such platform are really helping me out currently, as this is the same practice that I am following and yes I see improvement in my Clients SERP'S and engagement.
Again Thanks for sharing.
Cheers!!
Hi Rand,
Best up Luck for Black Friday Shopping & All the MOZ Members Too .. :) !!!
Great WBF Rand....Now only the bread on butter for website is collecting back links from sites like medium.com, Always I will make sure the sites who are giving links to us with high authority & those sites are giving us do-follow links. That will help a lot for SERPs ranking. Those site will give us better result, when we will keep posting new informative contents related to our services and product. Thanks Again for Awesome WBF....Rand...:)
How about a Tumblr blog with my own domain name? Imho best of both worlds .........
I think the biggest takeaway is understanding your audience and identifying where it is that your target market spends it’s time online. Creating quality content is important, but it’s more important to be able to spread that message to the people that are going to convert into paying customers.
Thanks for the breakdown there’s a lot of good ideas and resources!
Sup Man!
Found your buddy at #1 today:
https://i.imgur.com/Vo86D42.png
Hi Rand,
I´m totally agree. It´s possible the best way to increase your branding and your reputation but always under your lovely own page. It´s a good extra for marketers :)
I get a lot of followers from content that I publish on Linkedin. They read the content there, then check my profile and finally they finish on my website because they want more! haha .
And, of course, It must be original content. I don´t like copying-pasting on these platforms.
From someone who is still wondering how to create content let alone make my online presence known, this article really gave me some insights on how to use these blogging platforms.
I appreciate the time you spent to help us learn more about this topic. Thanks!
Rand,
Your WBF videos educate and inform, good job. We call LinkedIn, Medium, etc.. "external sites" My question is: How often do you recomend posting content to your site and your "external" sites/accounts?
We post a minimum of twice a month, (many times 3-4) on both our sites and our externals.
Joe
Excellent WBF for a Monday Morning viewing. I completely agree with keeping your best content for your own domain and using Social Platforms to help drive referral traffic to that content via excerpts, summaries, etc.
I really enjoyed this WBF. The closing statement you make about not using these sites as your only major location for content really hit a note. I have recently neglected my own site inadvertently in favour of social, rather than creating better onsite content to then be shared to my social. Time for a bit of a reversal I think.
I do think that trying to schedule a plan to help brand awareness is a good idea so that you could create a specific set of outreach posts each month for all/some of these areas. Short snippets for social based on your onsite content, with more ellaborate content for the hosted mediums etc. I think its finding that balance so that you can get a little reward from all theses areas.
Top notch as ever Rand.
Posting content on platforms like Linkedin can help expand your audience and build your brand. However, it shouldn't take the place of posting content on your own website. In fact, having a lot of informative, well written content on your website should be a core part of your SEO program. Posting content elsewhere should definitely be looked at the same way as guest blogging. In other words, it can help expand your audience and build your brand, but it shouldn't represent the core of your content marketing strategy.
Rand,
I Personally Feel that You are one of the Best Teacher who Explains things in a Way that anyone can Understand it.
Thanks, Rand,
Another very useful WBF.
Just one question regarding the benefit of "amplifying reach of existing content", what about the duplicate content issue if I post to the thirty party the same piece of content as I post on my own site?
I assume method of "posting on my own site first to wait until it indexed" is not working as all the thirty party websites are too strong for google to ignore.
A) I wouldn't recommend posting exactly the same thing to multiple sites. Make unique content that refers back to the original - perhaps excerpting elements or diving deep on one part of the broader content.
B) Yeah; timing isn't the only element to consider in duplicate content. Google's going to look for the most authoritative version, not just the one they first indexed.
Great.Every man who want to know about how to success in their life they should read this post.thanks for shering this important post.recently I try open a website so Its help me.thanks
Dear Sir,
Thanks For Article, Your Article is Very Help For Our Business.
I Will Use You Ideas.
Dipen
A great video presentation on this topic Rand. Thanks for sharing.
Publishing a post on Linkedin or Google Plus allows you to drive traffic to your blog post, grab new audiences, build a larger community, build links by attracting new audiences who then link to your post from their site, and just reach the right people that may be outside your community who are authority figures and who then make your creation go viral, then back to community growth, more links, more shares, etc.. I don't post on social media for the point of getting a back-link, that is old school and as we all know most of the time these back-links offer very minimal value, however compelling, educational, newsworthy, unique and content that benefits ones finances or happiness, now that is what provides SEO gains.
Proven example:
Just today I gained at least 5 links to my blog post here called "Chase Bank in Deep Shit" within an hour, because of a brief publication that I released on Linkedin here.
Ultimately this post will enable thousands of consumers that are unaware of Chase's latest fraud to save thousands of dollars, improve their credit etc… And it will provide Golden Financial Services, my company, with new business/clients, because I used my blog as the main source to publish the content. Of course if you look at the original post that I made here, at the end there is a call to action that says something along the lines of "to learn about Golden Financial Services credit card relief programs visit here.
All because of the power of SEO and publishing inside powerful sites like Linkedin, to reach wider audiences.
That's just within an hour, and what I know of, but I am sure by next week inside my Moz Pro account I will see that many more links were obtained from this post and due to the power of sharing on Linkedin!
I used social media to
- reach wider audience
- ultimately getting them to share my blog post
- subscribe to my blog
- link to my post from their site
- share my post with their social media community
- enabling my company to interact with their community
- get new readers
- possibly attract media sources
Helping to boost my organic rankings by showing Google that my post is educational, high quality, etc…
Of course on my original blog post mentioned above at our company blog, I made sure to implement on page SEO, schema.org, author bio, etc.. all implemented into the post, to ensure it ranks organically as it gets boosted by social media driven traffic.
The super power of social media is magnificent!!!
I am by no means an SEO wizard, I have been studying at Moz for nearly 3 years now, and 90% of what I know is from Rand, so thanks Rand, and please if anyone has feedback on what I did on this post please share. I appreciate all your feedback and expertise. We are all a team that help each other, even though all of us are from different companies, its pretty amazing, thanks to Moz!
Hi rand,
Indeed the medium and linkedin can boost your ranking as well as that was very easy to use and they approve instantly. Every one should use those site for great impact in ranking's.
Interesting Video, Not sure how ended up here but I have been wondering about this for quite some time so it has given me some great insight and saved me a lot of research
Hi rand
awesome your post . I think it is the best article in the world.