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RE: So you think you own your content on steem – Sorry to tell you…..

in #steem5 years ago

I'll have to research this because I include my own canonical links when I cross-post from my blog and other platforms. SteemPress automatically includes a "posted from" link at the bottom of my posts back to my blog. I revise those and add rel=canonical tags to my blogs. Are you telling me that Steemit's rel=canonical tag override mine? If so, that's a problem.

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from what I understand, if their domain authority is higher then yes, steemits canonical tags do override. If you do explore this a little further can you come back to me and let me know what you find out. SEO is a minefield and I am always intersted in learning more

Yes. I'll try to look into it today.

@paulag, I just searched for 10 of my Steemit posts by title. Only 4 out of 10 ranked better using my web properties or other sites where I posted first. I have two websites that I own where I use SteemPress to cross-post to Steemit on a 10 or 20 minute delay (it started out 20 minutes and I changed it to 10). After it posts on Steemit, I go into the Steemit post and edit, adding a rel=canonical tag to the link pointing back to my domain. It looks like older posts could go either way. A higher percentage of older posts rank my websites higher than Steemit. However, it's the newer posts I'm concerned about--post HF22.

It's possible that my personal search is affecting the results, so this is not conclusive. I've spent more time on Steemit lately than I was spending before HF21.

Another thing I'm seeing is the SERP sometimes shows Steampeak or another front-end above Steemit, and above my own properties. I never use Steampeak. I don't use any of the web-based front ends. I only use SteemPress. Sometimes, I use Steemit's UI, but only because lately eSteem Surfer hasn't been publishing for me. I think that might have something to do with Keychain.

One interesting note, none of the posts I checked where I posted first on Narrative and cross-posted to Steemit have better rankings with Narrative. All the Steemit versions are on top.

Bottom line: This is going to need further investigation.

I’d like to know more about manually adding canonical links to my Steempress articles.... maybe we could DM on discord some time? 😊🙏🏽

Sure, look me up. blockurator#7537

Essentially, though, you don't have to do it in WordPress. You can get a plugin and add canonical links to all of your posts, but you should also come to Steemit and edit your post. All I do is take the URL of the post and create html brackets around "my blog" with that URL, then I add the rel="canonical" tag inside the brackets.

Hmmmm .... tried to find you on Discord, but couldn't @blockurator.

Here's mine just in case I was doing something wrong: Raven [metametheus]#4772

@paulag, I've written two new posts on Steemit where the original appeared elsewhere first. In both cases, the re-publication happened mere minutes later than the original. That's significant as it is unlikely that the original was indexed yet. Also, in both cases, I used the canonical link tag to point to the original article. Thirdly, my title on Steemit was slightly different than my title on Narrative. And fourthly, Narrative is only a few months old so Steemit has a significant head start on domain age. Here's what I found.

In one case, Google ranked the Narrative version on top. In the other, the Steemit version is on top. Still inconclusive.

I'm using the Brave browser with DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. But I conducted my searches using Google. I then conducted the same searches with Microsoft Edge, which I never use and where I am not logged into my Google account. Same results.

It's possible that some of Steemit's posts are outranking canonical content posted elsewhere, but it's also possible that Google is the reason why and not necessarily Steemit's attempt to control the search results. Here are the links to my Steemit posts in case you want to run your own experiment.

Story 1 and Story 2

I'm still testing.