SEO for a Site That Wants to Be Copied

Standard SEO advice for publishers assumes you want to be the only copy. Ripost published an open invitation to copy, share, post and repost everything, including the text that said so.

That is an interesting constraint to be handed by your own founding document.

What actually breaks

Less than people assume. The fear is duplicate content penalties, which is mostly folklore. Search engines do not punish duplication, they pick a winner and ignore the rest. The real risk is losing that pick to somebody who copied you.

So the work was about staying the obvious original:

• Publish first and be crawlable fast. Whoever is indexed first has a large advantage in being treated as the source. For a site publishing all day, crawl efficiency matters more than any on-page tweak.
• Keep the source signals clean. Correct canonicals, correct dates, correct author and publisher markup. Not to stop copies, but so that when a copy appears, the original is the one with a coherent identity behind it.
• Ask for the link, do not demand it. We told people to take the content. Most of the ones who took it linked back anyway, because the ask was polite and the alternative was not enforced. Publishers who threaten legal action get fewer links, not more.

The parts that had nothing to do with copying

Most of the SEO and optimisation work was the unglamorous kind that any high-volume site needs.

Speed first. A site being read on a phone on a mobile connection in Kosovo in 2016 does not get to ship a heavy page. Every script had to earn its place, and most did not. The biggest wins were removals, not additions.

Then structure. Short news items, lists, video posts and shows are four different content types, and treating them as one template makes all four worse. Each needed its own markup so a video post was recognizable as a video and a list was not indexed as a stub article.

Then the internal links, which are free and almost always wasted. A story published today should reach the related coverage from three weeks ago without anyone remembering to add a link by hand.

What I would tell a publisher now

The instinct is to protect. Block the scrapers, wall the text, chase down republishers, send emails. It consumes real time and returns very little.

The alternative is to be the fastest, cleanest, most obviously canonical version of your own content, and then let the copies exist. They mostly send people back. Ripost took that position for ideological reasons. It turned out to also be the practical one.