Reblog search engine question

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  judyge · Member · Jan 2, 2015 at 10:19 am

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  I have been running a classic movies blog at WordPress for several years, and recently decided to set up a second blog on a related theme. (The new one is about classic British films.)

  I thought it would be a good idea to reblog my first film reviews from my new site to my established blog, in order to help build a following.

  However, I have now found that my first reblog at my old site has quite a high Google search ranking, whereas the original posting at my new site is nowhere to be seen! I thought the idea was for reblogs to work like links – if they are being indexed at Google as postings in their own right, surely one or both of my blogs could now be clobbered for duplicate content?

  I’m wondering if the problem is the large amount of text shown in the reblog – 168 words. Is there a way to show just 50 words or so?

  Does anybody have any tips about how to avoid this issue when reblogging? My two blogs are movieclassics.wordpress.com and britishfilmclassics.wordpress.com

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  raincoaster · Member · Jan 2, 2015 at 11:01 am

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  Yes, reblogs count as duplicate content as far as I can see. Absolutely. They are separate posts as far as search engines are concerned. If you put sufficient introductory original text with them, that MIGHT mitigate the effect, but that’s only a hypothesis.

  There’s no way to use the Reblog button and keep things to 50 words. You’d just have to make a regular post with a quotation and a link, old-skool style.

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  judyge · Member · Jan 2, 2015 at 11:19 am

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  Thanks, Raincoaster. In that case I’ll avoid using the reblog feature and will consider disabling it on my blogs in future.

  I had the impression from the WordPress info about this feature that it had been created in a way which maintained the original post as unique content, but you’ve confirmed my fears that this isn’t the case.

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  raincoaster · Member · Jan 2, 2015 at 1:24 pm

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  It pulls too much, and if you have a blog that shows excerpts on the front page, your own comments do not show on the front page; if they did, that would reduce the chances search engines would see it as duplication.

  I typically have done two reblogs a day on one of my blogs, but I’m going to cut that back and do old style reference blog posts like BoingBoing from now on. It takes a little longer, but it saves my SEO.

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  judyge · Member · Jan 2, 2015 at 2:39 pm

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  Sounds like a good idea. It would be good if the reblog feature could be tweaked in the future, though. Thanks again.

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  judyge · Member · Jan 2, 2015 at 2:46 pm

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  PS, and if it can’t be tweaked maybe it should be removed.