Don’t let Posterous ruin your blog’s SEO

« Search Marketing Blog

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 by Tom Hallett

Posterous is a ‘mini-blog’ site that lets you post blogs, photos, videos and lots more to the web by email.

As well as the ability to post to your Posterous from anywhere where you’ve access to your email, you can also automatically ‘autopost’ to your other pages like Twitter and Facebook, and your blogs on Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad.

Autoposts to Facebook and Twitter

Autoposting to places like Twitter and Facebook isn’t an issue for SEO. Posts to Twitter from Posterous will just include the post title and a link through to the post on Posterous.

And posts to your Facebook profile aren’t usually accessible to search engines unless you make your profile public.

When Posterous can create duplicate content

However, if you use Posterous to post to a blog, it’s likely to create a duplicate version of your post in two places – on Posterous and on your blog.

That’s fine if your a casual blogger. But, if you are trying to build traffic to your blog you don’t want it competing with the same content on Posterous.

So, what can you do?

You could just make your Posterous mini-blog private and use it to publish out to your other blogs and profiles. But lots people like the way you can post to Posterous and create a link on your Twitter feed back to your Posteorus post instantly.

Or, you could block your blog from the search engine indexes – probably not an option for most though – especially if you reply on your blog to bring you search traffic.

But the best (though not ideal) option is to use the ‘noindex’ metatag for all your Posterous posts.

It’s a bit tricky to work out how to add this, so here’s how:

1. Log in to your Posterous profile

2. Click on the ‘Manage’ link in the top navigation:

3. Then, underneath your mini-blog posts, select ‘edit settings’:

4. Choose the ‘Theme and customize my site’ button:

5. On this page, choose ‘Advanced:

6. Now your all set to change the code behind your Posterous profile. Just put the following metatag into the <head> section:

And there you go – the search engine robots will now continue to follow any links on your Posterous mini-blogs, but your Posterous posts won’t be indexed any more.

Posterous isn’t great for SEO

Obviously this isn’t an ideal solution. For a start, links to your Posterous mini-blogs won’t benefit the blog that you use it to publish to.

So, if you’re serious about building traffic to your blog, it’s probably best not to use Posterous to publish to it. Just keep your Posterous and main blog separate and promote each as you would with your other online profiles like Facebook and Youtube.

Posted in Blog | 3 Comments »

3 Responses to “Don’t let Posterous ruin your blog’s SEO”

gardenbeet says:

01/11/2009 at 9:39 am

thanks – i think i’ll delete
Chris Eden says:

17/11/2009 at 3:52 pm

Great post guys! Thanks.
SEO Doctor says:

26/11/2009 at 7:37 pm

Just going to have a play with this now, have never got round to it. Still dofollow links though?