Duplicating, Re-Publishing & Re-Purposing Content: What are the Issues? [Part II]

By Nicki Ong

Last time, we started talking about the differences between duplicate content and re-publishing vs. re-purposing your content. Today, we’ll finish up with the last two items.

Re-Publishing Your Content

What is re-published content?

Republished content is the same content published on multiple platforms. Some popular platforms for blogposts or articles include your own blog, LinkedIn Pulse, Medium, Quora, and more.

There are also plenty of verticals or niche platforms that make sense for unique industries to publish content on.

Should you re-publish your content?

Recently, there has been a lot of research around the issues sharecropping your digital content (or effectively relying on a single medium for your online success). In other words: focusing on a single medium (such as only publishing content on your own blog and nowhere else) won’t get you as far as publishing on multiple platforms.

While our rule of thumb has always been to take a single piece of content and link to it in as many places as possible, we haven’t always been big believers in re-publishing the actual content itself in multiple places. The reason being is – as we stated last time – Google will choose the main source of content as the result shown the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

However, you can publish the same content without giving authority to the main source (using the rel=”canonical” tag). For more information on all of this – that isn’t too geeky – check out this great article.

Re-Purposing Your Content

The most ideal option when we talk about cross-publishing or multi-channel publishing of your content is by re-purposing it.

What is re-purposed content?

Re-purposed content is that which has been changed, altered, or otherwise differentiated for different platforms.

As an example, I could re-purpose this particular post by re-naming it “Why You Can Duplicate & Re-Publish Content, But Re-Purposing Will Always Win,” rewriting it to have some of the same information but in a different way, then publishing to a different platform other than my own blog.

The Pros of Re-Purposed Content

By re-purposing your content, you’re giving yourself additional opportunities to be found online. The search engines will show each post or article result as separate options in order to give the searcher different options to choose.
You’ll also reach a different audience by re-pupurposing your content. If I choose to re-purpose this post on LinkedIn, for example, I’ll have the ability to better reach my LinkedIn audience by doing so.

The Cons of Re-Purposed Content

When you re-purpose, you’ll inherently be spending more time to do so. Re-purposing means significantly re-writing a post, which takes time.
You won’t always get the best bang for your buck. The hope in re-purposing your content is, of course, to reach a wider audience and have additional opportunities to be found…but that won’t always happen. Often, the content that you think won’t get a lot of traction goes viral and those posts you’ve put a lot of thought into don’t go anywhere.

Point being: don’t expect that just because you’ve spent the time and worked hard on a single piece of content that it will always get the interest you want to see.

And there you have it…the differences and issues between duplicate, re-published, and re-purposed content.

Find out what’s going to be best for you and your content by experimenting and trying new things. After all, you never know what’s going to work the best for any given piece of content!