Reposted vs. repurposed content – what’s the difference?

Repurposing content is a key component of any good online marketing strategy. But some marketers new to the content game at times confuse repurposing with reposting (in fact, some editorial professionals do as well). Understanding the difference, however, is important to delivering a positive reader experience and building trust with potential customers and search engines alike.

• Repurposed content – This is when you create multiple content items from the same singular asset.
• Reposted content – Also referred to as “duplicate” content, this generally refers to any time the same content items are posted multiple times under the same domain.

Reposting content is a bad practice for a number of reasons, but most notably because it creates a bad reader experience. No one wants to visit a site and find multiple pages that are exactly the same, and perhaps more importantly, neither does Google. If the search engine police flag your site for duplicate content, it could seriously hurt your page rank value. (Note: There are no actual search engine police, just Google’s mysterious algorithm –which is even scarier.)

So where’s the confusion come from?
While by general definition, duplicate content refers to items living under the same domain, a far more common and misunderstood practice involves reposted or duplicate content posted across either A) multiple sites hosted by the same company, or B) external sites as well as your own.

Let’s start with the former. In a content marketing strategy, a company may host multiple sites: a main corporate site, a separate blog site, or even multiple content sites devoted to specific topic areas (most common in larger companies). In an effort to increase content volume, the company might repost an article published on one of its sites to every other site in its portfolio. (Note: this is not limited to content marketing. I know of one popular online publishing company that hosts multiple sites and posts duplicate content across all of them. Which begs the question, why not just have one site and be done with it?)

Some might consider this as simply repurposing content from one site to another, but the practice is actually against the true spirit of repurposing. With repurposed content, the idea is to create multiple pieces of different content from the same asset. This could be in the form of:

• a multipart article series
• an article and companion podcast
• a Q&A video with the audio posted separately as a podcast, and with an article based on the content or transcription of the interview

There are lots of examples, but you get the idea.

But wait – isn’t that all still just the same thing? Yes and no. As Thomas Clifford wrote recently for the Content Marketing Institute, not everyone consumes information the say way. Responsibly repurposing content in different formats like this can actually be a great practice that increases visibility to your site.

Repurposing with external sites, however, is a little bit trickier. For example, there are situations where an article that was originally posted on your site could appear in its entirety elsewhere (either through content syndication or even straight-up theft). While this type of “duplicate content” was once feared to carry a hefty search penalty (not really true), it can still have a negative effect on traffic.

As for me, I generally try to stick to the following: everything you post should be as unique to your site as possible. While syndication can draw attention to your organization and even help provide backlinks for SEO value, it also gives readers a reason not to visit your company’s site. Even if your strategy involves submitting posts to article directories, you should still change the text to make them different.

A better syndication practice? Write something unique for those other external sites! Not only will you get better value, but if the site in question is associated with a thought leader or popular online personality, you increase the chance that they might write something unique for you as well.

I’d like to make one last point about SEO here. While having your article appear on multiple sites won’t “technically” get you penalized in search, it will force Google to decide which version of the content is the “right” one to list in its rankings — and there’s no guarantee it will choose yours. (Google provides a good explanation of how it deals with duplicate content items here.) Remember, Google is all about providing a positive reader experience, so give it what it wants – lots of good, unique content!

I’ll write more about some of my favorite repurposing techniques in future posts. Until then, check out the cool links below, and remember — repurpose responsibly.

5 ways to repurpose content for social media (Wearethe1s.org)

Green online marketing: Repurposing content (TopRank Blog)

You can find more information on content marketing and editorial practices at the OpenView Labs website. You can also follow Brendan on Twitter @BrenCournoyer and find more from the OpenView team @OpenViewVenture.