I'm excited to share this new series with you, called "101 Blogging Tips". In the series there will be 101 blogging tips that you can begin applying to your blog today! Don't wait, get started now!

Tip #40: Reduce Duplicate Content

Yesterday I posted a partial article I wrote for another site as a guest author.  The reason I couldn't have included the entire article is that it would create "duplicate content".  One of the biggest problems with duplicate content is that search engines don't know which is the original, which to rank, and messes with metrics such as "authority" to name a few.

SEOMOZ shares more detailed information on duplicate content and the "problems" with it and how to "deal" with it.

Blog Transfers
Once of the reasons I want to mention this is how a blog transfer can "hurt" your SEO, at least temporarily as it is performed and duplicate content exists – the original posts on the old blog and the imported posts on the new blog ===>>> duplicate content.  Now, the problem is that if you delete the old blog, then all the images in the new blog will "disappear". 

So what do you do? Unfortunately, I can't answer that and what is more important to you — starting fresh with nothing or populating years and years of your hard work into a newer, better platform and keeping it all intact.  How much of a SEO hit does it take? Is it enough to start fresh? If you post a lot, then you will be building new content more and more and those articles are unique and can rank well.

So for those of you transfering, I would still transfer the content if possible and watch your rankings.  if you feel the decline is too great, then you can ditch the old blog but at the cost of losing all the images. Unless you go through a process of hiring some programmer or if you manually save the old pictures to your computer or Cloud and the manually re-insert into the new blog.  That takes time, but some do it.

So take it a step at a time. Think about it.  Also know that I have done many transfers where more do keep the content than start fresh, but there isn't that big of a gap between the two. Starting fresh though may mean a new domain name, a new opportunity, a new concept or idea.  So again, take time to think it through and what plans you have going forward.