Let’s say you’ve got a gold mine of content in your old newsletters and you’re itching to give them a new lease on life as blog posts. Or perhaps you want to launch a new newsletter, and also want to share the content you create as content on your website. It’s a great idea. But there are a few things you need to consider to make sure you don’t step on any SEO traps like duplicate content.

Basically, we want to ensure your blog continues to rank as the primary source of your content.

The Duplicate Content Issue

First things first: Does posting your newsletter content on your blog unleash duplicate content hounds if your newsletter content is also in a public archive? Well, not exactly. Google doesn’t really slap out penalties solely for duplicate content, but it can get confused about which version to prioritize in search results.

If Google’s scratching its head, users might not find your content when and where you want them to. The goal is to make sure Google sees your blog as the “go-to” place for this content, rather than your public newsletter archive.

Make Your Blog the Star of the Show

Here’s how you can ensure your blog gets the spotlight in search results, rather than the public archive hosted by your ESP.

  1. Publish on your blog first: This is like calling dibs in SEO. It establishes your blog as the original source, and search engines tend to respect that. This move alone can help your blog post be seen as the primary source when Google comes crawling. However, if your content has already been published on your newsletter, see step 2.
  2. Improve the blog: If your newsletter content is a tad old, or maybe overly succinct, add some new information or insights when publishing it to your website. Your readers will thank you for it, but it also differentiates this content from the original newsletter.
  3. Internal links: Internal linking can work very well here. By linking to your new blog post from other relevant pages on your site, you boost its visibility and apparent relevance compared to the newsletter version.
  4. Social signals: Share your blog post on social media. These likes and shares offer social signals, which can indirectly influence your SEO.
  5. Noindex, No Problem: Where possible, use a noindex tag on your newsletter archive if it’s publicly accessible. This tells search engines not to index those pages, leaving your blog post as the clear winner in the SEO race. Take a look at the support materials from your ESP or reach out to their support team to find our if (and how) you’re able to do this on your platform of choice (this is an easy option that should solve most problems).
  6. External links: External links are like gold in the SEO world, however, as these are pretty difficult to rack up, we left this step till last. Basically, if other reputable sites link to your blog post, it signals to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative. So, if you can, get some of these under your belt.

What About Canonical Tags?

Ah, canonical tags—if only it were that simple. Canonical tags can be placed in the HTML code of a page, signalling that certain hyperlinks are linking to the “canonical” or primary version of that content, letting Google know which it should prioritise.

If you could, you’d simply slap a canonical tag onto your newsletter content (which would point to your blog post) to tell search engines that your blog post is the “real” version.

But here’s the kicker: many email platforms don’t let you modify the HTML of your newsletter archive. Some might, but most don’t. No control means no canonical tags, which therefore means you need to get a bit more creative with the other strategies above.

What About Canonical Tags in my HTML Email Template?

If your custom HTML template is never actually made public (i.e. if that version of your newsletter is never publicly visible), then there’s no real benefit of adding canonical tags to the links within the template.

However, if your HTML template is in fact available publicly (and indexed by search engines), then there may be some benefit to adding canonical tags to the links within the template.

The Gist Of It

Figuring out the best way ensure repurposed newsletter content doesn’t impact your SEO in any way shouldn’t be too difficult. The simplest option would be to noindex your newsletter archives (you might want to check this before picking an ESP), so that they never appear in search results, along with implementing a few of the approaches above…