where should you be publishing your content? 💻

psyched

Today's challenge:

Setting up your site

& Syndication

Hey friend,

It's Day #1 of our blogging challenge and I don't know about you but I am psyched.

Today's email is going to cover these topics:

	Why you should publish on your own domain name
	How to syndicate content the right way
	3 quick bits of homework to do before tomorrow's email

Tomorrow's email will be about generating and validating ideas for your blog posts. If you're already convinced to blog on your own domain, and you don't plan to publish content on third-party platforms like Medium or ThePracticalDev, skip down to the Homework at the end.

But for now, onto publishing and syndicating content correctly 👇

Why you should be publishing on your own domain name

The reason for this is simple: You own it.

It's just you and your website. And you can choose to do whatever you want with it. And isn't that freedom why we became developers in the first place?

Social media can change "the algorithm". Google can put more ads on top of your search results. Twitter can suspend your account. Medium can run out of funding (awkward 😬).

But your domain (and eventually, your email list) are YOURS.

You can always change your hosting, your domain registrar, your email list software.

But you won't have that freedom if you lock your audience into a third-party platform.

So you might be thinking, "Cool, Monica, owning my domain is nice but NO ONE IS GOING THERE." 😰

While I don't find it necessary (and you might not either, after this challenge), you can syndicate your content in a way that won't hurt your Google rankings. Here's how.

How to syndicate content in a way that doesn't hurt your Google rankings

So we know that having the content on your site is the best place to have it. But what if you also want to publish the same post on a third-party website or platform for more exposure? This concept is known as syndication.

The problem arises when your website and another website have the exact same content on them. Google considers this "duplicate content". When content is duplicated, Google may use other factors to decide who to rank. And if you're competing with a massive website, yours might be the one that gets ignored 😭

You can solve this with a canonical URL that designates the original content. Here's how to fix it in 3 quick steps:

Step 1. Set up canonical URLs on your own website

This is what the tag looks like in the <head> of your post:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://domain.com/blog/slug-of-your-post" />

Make sure you're handling common issues like trailing slashes, adding/removing the www, etc. with the proper 301s. If you search for "your blogging platform + canonical urls" you'll probably find out how to set it up (if you use Gatsby, here's a plugin I've used with success, but don't forget the server-side redirects too).

Step 2. Publish your blog post on your own website

Do this first so you can grab the canonical URL.

Step 3. Copy the URL to your blog post into the canonical URL space on the third-party platform

Here's how to do it on a few platforms:

	https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033930293-Set-a-canonical-link

	https://dev.to/p/editor_guide

	https://townhall.hashnode.com/why-you-should-republish-your-devblog-posts-and-how-to-do-it-cjyzonun0004t4zs1r601f5ie

Want to learn more about canonical URLs? Read this article by Yoast: The Ultimate Guide to Canonical URLs.

Your homework.

	Buy your domain name if you haven't yet (I recommend Namecheap, and go for a trustworthy .com TLD)

	Pick your blogging tech stack (It really doesn't matter, I've used Hugo and Gatsby and both are fine.  No shame at ALL if you want to use WordPress, either. The less you tinker with the tech stack, the more you focus on writing!)

	Get your canonical URLs sorted out (View the source of your site and find the rel="canonical" tag, make sure it's the same URL as your post!) ⚠️ Even if you do not plan to syndicate content, you should STILL have correct canonical urls.

Now that your site is set up for publishing, tomorrow we'll talk about generating and validating blog post ideas 💡

Let's do this!

@monicalent

P.S. Were you already planning to publish to your own domain? Why or why not? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of syndicating content on other platforms! Hit "Reply" to this and share your experience.

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where should you be publishing your content? 💻

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