Link rel="canonical"

I've noticed that many Steemians will copy articles from their blogs or other sources for use on SteemIt.

This creates two problems: The first is that Hive account@cheetah is likely to flag the post as potential plagiarism, which will reduce your upvote count.

The second problem is that that Google webcrawler might determine that SteemIt post is the original. Google will lower the page rank for your blog.

The best solution is avoid cutting and pasting content from your web site ... even when you own the content!!!!!

So, lets say you have a great article on your blog that you want to share on steem. The best path is to paraphrase the article with a link back to your blog.

This method has several advantages. It means that your SteemIt article is short and concise. The link to your web page adds legitimacy to your article and it brings web traffic to your web site.

As for the name of this post:

Back in 2009, Google finally recognized that were legitimate reasons for web sites to have duplicate content. To help sort out duplicate content, they introduced "canonical" linking.

So, lets say you have two copies of the same content on different pages. You can put a link tag in the header of the page with the attribute rel="canonical" and an href="" attribute to the source.

The Canonical tag tells Google not to index the current page. Google adds a little page rank to the referenced page.

This is a very useful tag for the small number of times when web sites need to have duplicate content. It should be used rarely.

Some self-proclaimed SEO-Experts have accidentally removed web sites from Google by placing the "link rel=canonical" on every page of a site.

Hackers can remove a site from Google by placing this link in the headers of a template.

Needless to say, SteemIt and other social networks won't let users put the rel="canonical" directive on their sites.

So, again the best solution is to paraphrase articles with links back to the source. A paraphrased article with a link back to your site will help establish your site as the canonical source.

There is actually only a very small number of times when you really need to copy and paste text online. When you copy and paste an article from your blog into SteemIt, you run the risk of Google deciding that SteemIt is the canonical source and that your blog is plagiarizing from SteemIt.

CREDITS: The photo of a Canon at Gettysburg. It is by flownaksala and is available through Big Stock Photo