I’ve got a lot of content I’ve posted on forums, basically stories, images, and reports of my travels. I now want to bring a lot of that content into my own site where I can add additional value to it such as photos, and discussion.
Obviously I could edit my forum posts, but I don’t want to totally remove the content from the forums either.
What’s the best way to go about this without incurring a duplicate content penalty?
Unless your a admin you may have a hard time editing your forum posts. I would venture to say google doesn’t count duplicate content found in forums quite the same, as by nature forums are basically a bunch or parroted content. Just like there is your twin somewhere in the world. 9 times out of 10 there is a identical forum post somewhere.
Furthermore. 10 years ago before all this double content hupla, I copied a few of my articles onto some sites like searchthis or other. I just ignored that I did this. As there is no real solution other than the difficult task of traking all those down and deleting.
Thanks.
I’ll just do what i want with the content, and use link attribution on the forums.
You can consider expanding on your original forum postings extensively by adding photos, discussions, thoughts, etc. before republishing it onto your website, and by extensively, I mean adding around 300 to 500 words to the original content.
Having some quality inbound links pointing to the republished content on your website will tell search engines that the republished content is actually more useful than the forum postings. This shouldn’t be a problem if the republished content is more useful and valuable for visitors. You may need to share it on relevant social media sites and with influencers if your website is still very new.
Going back to your forum posts and editing them takes a lot of time and I would rather spend that time working on my own website.
With my experience as an SEO, I can confirm that duplicate issue hamper the performance of a website when it has more than 70% content as duplicate content. So ensure whenever you are adding your forums comments on your website, you do add more content to make it 30% of total content.
If you decide to bring the content to one unified domain, make sure that this content offers value to other users. ideally, it should be rewritten; however, you can update it and add something new as well as provide a way for users to comment.
Once you bring your content under one roof, you can run a duplicate content check using www.plagspotter.com or [URL=“http://www.copysape.com”]www.copysape.com as well as monitor your content for duplication to be ahead of the game.