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X-posting from your blog to dev.to, thoughts?

endan on January 22, 2018

This blog didn't make me think twice to blog after reading it. It just made perfect sense! Now for building online presence, does it make sense to ...
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Joshua Johnson

Simple answer, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If you are trying to attract people to your website, x-posting to dev.to works out well because in many cases they promote your content. If you are trying to score SEO, I suggest not to because you are putting duplicate content out there. Which Google's algorithm pretty much is designed to compare overall site rankings and will put dev.to in the key words you are trying to score for in place of your blog.

The best of both worlds is to place unique content for each with dev.to being more focused towards the development audience, linking back to a blog post you are trying to promote.

Hope that helps.

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Sergio Daniel Xalambrí

The SEO part is not an issue if you define canonical_url in the frontmatter part of your dev.to post, this will tell Google that the real URL of your post is the one defined there.

Check support.google.com/webmasters/answ...

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Jess Lee

Yes! Add a canonical url!

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endan

Ah, that makes sense. Also, the SEO part is something I overlooked.

Thank you for your comment!

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Arden de Raaij

I crosspost everything except articles that really don't have anything to do with development (my 2017 year in review for example).

I am thinking of making a special site for my Weekly Web Roundup where people can subscribe to only my web digest articles through RSS or mailing list. It seems that dev.to has decided not to share these articles on their twitter while they do have quite an audience. I think I'll go for self-promotion instead!

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endan

Looking forward to that!

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Jason C. McDonald

I've got the opposite problem! I tend to write the article here, and wind up needing to backport the article to my blog.