You May Not Want to Auto Post to Another Blog With Posterous

A note about the dangers of auto posting to other blogs with Posterous.

It is true that you can do all of this, but what they are not saying is that if you use Posterous to post to another blog, and you want the other blog to be the official source of of the information in Google search results, you will run into problems. Google has made changes to their search indexing algorithm, called “the Panda Update.” They are penalizing sites that post information that is duplicated elsewhere, and are favoring (rightfully so) the original content.
 

A made up but realistic use case.

To get an idea about how this could effect a Posterous user, let’s create an imaginary use case. Joe Blogger has a Blogger blog with a custom url pointing to his blogspot blog. He uses Posterous to email his post to Posterous, and auto posts to his main blog, facebook page and send a tweet about it. Very cool. Or is it?

There are two problems with this.

First – Google will naturally see that Posterous, not joeblogger.com is the originating website for the content, thereby indexing the main sight lower, if at all.

The second problem is this – the facebook post and the tweet are going to point the reader back to Posterous, not Joe Blogger’s intended sight, and this hurts Joe’s main sight rankings even more. Search engines are now taking social networks and the amount of sharing into account when they rank content.

So, what to do moving forward.

Rich Pearson (@richiepear on twitter) the VP of marketing at Posterous has stated in a forum post titled Why I Am Dropping Posterous This Weekend that they have always intended that users use Posterous as their primary blogging platform.

Bonnie – thanks for your feedback and we’re aware of the ‘Panda’ update. We’re definitely focused on the scenario of using Posterous as your main website and continue to add new features to support this.

We enabled autoposting to other blog platforms like WordPress and Blogger for one main purpose – to get folks to switch to Posterous . . . or at least build their next site on Posterous. Our belief is that once bloggers experience our ease of posting and what it’s like to be on a platform that continues to innovate, they will move over.

Fortunately, this has worked out pretty well for us, but we still have lots to do as you point out – javascript and widget support is on our short list and should be out within the next few months.

So, he’s saying that the last couple of years of claims that Posterous is the super simple way to post everywhere may be true, but it isn’t really the best way, AND it was never really the intention of the company for it’s users to operate this way.

I have pretty much done what he suggests, that is make Posterous my main and pretty much only platform. If I had a lot of link love built up on another platform however, I’d be hard pressed to make the switch, the platform is just to limiting for many people.