Introduction
Article Sections
Sometimes when you are writing, you think about using some content that you have already created. This is understandable because you more often than not have content that is useful and relevant across many of your articles. Also, some important ideas and concepts that you express in your articles are ones that you want to convey to your audience throughout your website. This means figuring out how to rewrite a concept without it coming across as duplicate content that constantly repeats over and over. How can I do this and still satisfy an article’s SEO requirements? That is the focus of this article. I will show you when and how to repurpose your content so that you can give it new life as you write more articles.
What is Repurposing Content?
Repurposing content is the idea that you are reusing the same content in another place. This could be another article but could also be an image, video, social media post, newsletter, almost anything that you can think of. The reason why you would use the same content again somewhere else is because you might have something more to say about from the last time that you visited the topic. After we publish an article, we think about what we wrote and we come up with more that we want to write about. You could and should revisit your published articles and write more about them. Sometimes we want to write a brand new article and just want to use a short snippet about something that we wrote before. This makes your content portable because it is as easy as just summarizing a short description of the reused content and linking to it. You can then just save yourself the need to write the entire topic again. Try not to go overboard though, you are just using some part of your content again as a reference. That is why the link is there to always point to your original source.
Does Repurposing Content Affect SEO?
There is no SEO “penalty” when it comes to repurposing content again. The reason why is because you are being selective on the content that you are reusing. You also are relating that reused content to another topic. Think about when you wrote papers in school and you had to cite your source. At the end of your paper you always had a bibliography that tells you where you got your sources from. This made it easy to know how reliable the statements and points that you are making in your paper are. I mean, we obviously are not doing any blatant copy and pasting here.
Google Knows When You Put Effort Into Your Writing
Google will know that because it takes no effort to do that. We are putting actual thought into our words and trying to convey a point to our audience. As long as Google can tell that you are just referencing your content from another article, you should be fine in terms of SEO. This actually makes you look better because you are able to take your articles and repurpose them in so many related articles. This is why you see that many of my more recent articles have links to my other articles. The reason why is because once you have written a good catalog of related articles, it becomes so easy to link them together.
Why You Should Repurpose Content
Repurposing content is a necessity because you need to exhaust your content as much as possible. This not only makes you think critically about how you can relate your content in other ways but it also lets you get creative and come up with long tail keywords. With the pressure to rank on Google, we have to target keyword phrases that do not have much search volume. This often means adding another keyword or two in our article headings and possibly coming up with something new. This is why some of my newer articles combine so many topics together and have become more like pillar articles.
Staying Inside Your Niche Means That You Have to Exhaust Your Keywords
As mentioned in the last section, you might find yourself reusing content a lot because of the need to stay within your niche. Many people believe that you should exhaust everything that you can in your niche in great detail before expanding your niche bubble. The reason why is because if you really get into your niche and write as much as you can about it, then you will have all of your bases covered. This means that you are protected against those who might enter your niche and compete with you for rankings.
Once You Have Exhausted Your Niche, Expand Slowly and Not Too Far or Fast
This is why staying in your niche is so hard because you can only say so much about your main topic because you feel like you are done. Then you feel tempted to expand your niche and write about related topics. As I have mentioned and have been doing in this blog is linking my related articles together. Make sure that you expand slowly so that your new sets of topics still relate to you main niche. This makes it easier to link your articles together. If you stray too far away from your niche, then you will have a hard time linking your articles together.
Do Not Stray Too Far Away From Your Niche
If you stray away from your niche and go off the path, you should think about this first. Sometimes we want to write about something new, even if it has nothing to do with our niche. We see this a lot on YouTube. People will make random videos on all sorts of things. This makes it hard for people to really understand what the YouTube channel is about if it is too sporadic and has no underlying theme. Same thing with blogs. We need to know when to expand our niche and do it slowly and carefully. We cannot possibly link two articles that are completely different from each other. The lack of relation between two different topics will throw your blog off if Google gets too confused and what your focus is. This is not a race. This is not about just writing on a whole bunch of different topics and seeing what sticks and what does not. Just like life, a blog takes time and you will be rewarded if you have patience and enjoy the journey that you take with your users.
Paraphrase Your Content And Relate it to New Topics
I already said to paraphrase to repurpose content. You definitely do not need paraphrasing or AI content generators to do this. Just do it yourself because like I said in the article that I just linked to, your people want to hear your voice, not a robot’s. For example, in this article about repurposing content, I spoke about pillar articles earlier and then paraphrased. I have already written about these topics and since they are related to repurposing, I linked to them instead of writing large portions of the articles again in this one. This makes no sense, this is why links exist. Otherwise you enter the world of plagiarism and I will talk about it and duplicate content later. You do not need to do the work twice in a desperate attempt to drag your articles out just to squeeze more words. This is why I have said that when your article is done, it is done. Just publish your article and move on.
What is Repeating or Duplicating Content?
I just finished talking about repurposing content and ended that section on the idea of teetering on plagiarism. Now I want to talk about repeating the same content across your website. First off, I want to talk about the idea of using reusable blocks in the Gutenberg block editor. When you use a reusable block, any content inside that block can be used on any page. This is good when you want to show the same content on multiple pages as a way to remind users to perform some sort of call-to-action at the end of the article. A reusable block in this case, can be used to show users buttons that send them to other similar articles. You do not want to create this block over and over again among your pages so you use a reusable block instead in order to make it easier to show your buttons. If you see these same buttons, is this duplicate content? Yes it is, but let me explain what this means in terms of SEO.
Does Duplicate Content Affect SEO?
We always wonder if duplicate content is a problem with SEO. Duplicate content in small amounts on a page is no problem at all. As long as the majority of the content on the page is unique and is relevant to your HTML heading tags, then you are fine. This is why I mention using reusable blocks to create call-to-action buttons that can be placed on several of your pages. Those buttons are just a small portion of HTML compared to the whole page so no worries here. That is different when you have something called thin content.
Thin Content Can Lead to Duplicate Content Issues
Thin content means that you do not have enough unique content for Google to work with. Then Google has issues with trying to find out what keywords your page should rank for because you have not provided it with enough content. If you are interested in knowing more about how long your articles should be, I discuss that in an article about finding the right length for your articles. In the case of thin articles, you should think about writing more to make sure that Google knows exactly what you are talking about. The more of the guess work that you take out for Google, the better than you rank. Again, you are trying to rank on Google, not the other way around. Google does not care for your content if it deems it unworthy. So you need to prove to Google and go out of your way to make it easy for Google to say that your content is the best.
Keyword Stuffing: An Obvious and Desperate Attempt to Rank High
It is understandable that the search engines do not like the idea that your pages are just using reusable blocks to spread your keywords all over your pages. This is something called “keyword stuffing” and was an early practice when search engines had just come out. Keyword stuff was common before but the problem was when you just list a million keywords on a page without context, in hopes that the search engines will pick the keywords up and rank you at the top. This frowned upon practice also made it so that keywords would show up so much on a page, that they had a really high keyword count to make it seems like it was really relevant to what users are looking for.
There is Bound to Be Some Content That Repeats
I mentioned about staying inside your niche and expanding slowly when you are ready to go after new topics related to your niche. As I mentioned in the previous sections about repeating content, you will do so sooner or later. If you understand how to use it properly and not just shoehorn it into your articles, then you will be fine. There is too much stigma and negativity against repetitive content. Especially if your repeating content is generic and does not contain large portions of your other articles.
Taking Large Portions of Text: Quoting and Citing
Even if you do use large portions of your articles within other articles, you will have a reason to do so. Perhaps there is something very special that requires you to take a large part and just reuse it. If you do, then make it clear that you are copying this piece over to illustrate a point in another article and a simple link will not suffice. You just have to send clear signals to both your readers and Google about it. You can use something called a pull quote so that we know that you took something verbatim. This is just like writing a paper. You take a significant portion of a source, you must both quote and cite it.
What is the Difference Between Repurposing and Duplicating Content?
Repurposing content involves mentioned content from one article in another article and then using a link to provide the full details between articles. This is a necessity as staying inside your niche makes it so that you will need to talk about central and basic concepts constantly in many of your articles. Duplicating content on its own is just taking whole pieces from one source and placing them in another without acknowledging where it came from or using it to make a point. Your blog will look really weird if you were just to take the same stuff word for word and not even put in a little bit of effort in paraphrasing it.
Summary
Repurposing content is great if small portions are paraphrased and linked to. Many topics, especially technical detailed ones, cannot be covered in just a single article. We need to link our articles together to extend their length and provide details for users who want to read more. There is some concern about reusing content because people think that Google might flag it as being duplicate. You just have to know what you are doing when reusing content with some common sense. You should repurpose as much as possible to exhaust your niche as you delve into every single topic in it. Once your niche is exhausted then you can expand your niche into related topics. Beware not to stray too far from your niche when expanding because your blog will start to veer off. This also makes it harder to link your articles together if they lose any similarity between them. Duplicating content can be fine as long as you still have enough unique content on the page for Google to identify. Thin content might suffer from duplicate content because there is not enough unique content to satisfy Google need to be able to determine what keywords to rank your page on its search engine. If you really need to take large portions of content into your article, make sure to quote and cite.
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