When I conducted My Steemit SEO Experiment nearly a month ago, I had always intended to write another update. I wanted to share "A Result" to my experiment so that I could say with some confidence whether or not there's an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) benefit to sharing content outside of a community.
Since that post, I've learnt a few new things about how Steemit works and I would like to share some of this with you.
Why my SEO Experiment Failed
There are 2 reasons why my experiment didn't produce a result - one key one being linked to the issue that knocked out Booming support on 29th March. On this date, a couple of lines of code were introduced which prevented Google from indexing any content on steemit.com - this issue was resolved after @moecki spotted it on 18th April.
My experiment began right in the middle of this, on 8th April which will have contributed to why my post wasn't indexed.
The 2nd reason is perhaps the most interesting and why my experiment would probably have failed anyway. The reason is linked to the title of my post...
The Importance of #steemexclusive
When Steemit.com first launched, it was the only interface displaying content from the Steem Blockchain. As Steemit grew in popularity, other interfaces appeared which meant that search engines (like Google) didn't know who the original content creator was. Was it steemit.com, steempeakd.com or somewhere else? So which site should Google et al. give the authority too?
These new front-ends were damaging Steemit.com's Page Rank. So on 11th September 2018, @steemitblog announced the introduction of canonical URLs. For the non-techny, it's Steemit.com saying in code "I am the master copy". If anybody else says "I'm the master copy", then search engines will look at the published date and say "No you're not. You're a liar. I don't like liars."
In my experiment, I had 2 pages with identical content - both saying they're the master. Which did Google believe? Neither of them.
So given that HIVE (for example) is a Fork of Steemit, it's clear that their pages are also marked as "Canonical" - also the Master. So by publishing your content on Hive and Steemit, depending upon which platform you're posting on first, will influence which site Google penalises.
This is also true of plagiarised content. If you copy and paste something onto Steemit and Steemit claims to be the Master, Google will know that you've done this and penalise Steemit for it.
seoblog.com puts it rather nicely:
Search Engines Are Smart
Nowadays, when a person tries to add plagiarized data to any website, search engines are aware of it. They also know where it was first published, who published it for the first time and even the time and date of publication.
This technique helps them in determining the best version of each piece of content. If the content first appeared on a high-ranking, high-authority website, search engines will crawl that version and ignore yours.
(Quotes like the above are marked as < blockquote > in the HTML so we shouldn't be penalised!)
To highlight this further, on 23rd July 2018, Steemit had just fallen out of the top 1,000 Global Alexa Rankings. On 30th April 2022 when Alexa decided to stop this service, Steemit ranked 4,105th. (There will be numerous factors contributing to this.)
Original source no longer exists
As an aside, this comment by @rockykelley resonated somewhat:
Thank you for your post. As a Steemian who posts only original content, it is frustrating seeing copyright violators and spam earning high rewards, while original posters earn pennies, if that much. Hope the trend turns around soon.
š¤
I have many more thoughts on Rankings which I'll save for another day so on to my next learning...
The Rewards Threshold
In response to my initial post, @pennsif commented:
If I recall in the past the Steemit posts used to pop up on the search engines much more regularly, but how well they fared in the search engines was related to the amount of voting they caught.
I very, very vaguely remember someone writing an explanation of this - but the details are lost in the deep recesses of my mind, so it might be a mismemory.
With me being the curious fellow that I am, I had to learn what @pennsif was referring to so using my new fronet-end, I filtered for "seo" and "steemit" and went back numerous years to see what I could learn. And I learnt a lot (including all of the above).
I found the information that @pennsif was referring to in this post by @daan - Post Rewards Less Than $10? No Backlinks For You!.
One of the initial reasons that some people joined Steemit was to promote themselves / their business using Steemit's "Page Rank" (which has always been very strong) to help boost their own website (via what's called a backlink). In this post by @cflclosers, it is explained well and to prevent people using Steemit's "authority", a minimum reward value of $10 is required before links changed from "no follow" to "follow". This means that by default, web crawlers (like Google's Bot) won't leave Steemit unless a post is highly rewarded.
Given that so few users appear to be promoting external sites any more, the relevance of backlinking to other sites is perhaps limited. This method could be used succesfully though to promote other articles of your own - for example my list of previous away days at the end of each Away Days article (do you see what I did there?)
My research of old articles led me to some very interesting content on the subject of SEO and its relevance to steemit.com. I've often thought about creating SEO targeted personas and articles for specific content themes - in order to attract organic traffic to steemit.com and then promote how to join, how to deposit, etc. at the end of each post.
It's something that continues to nestle in my mind and has huge growth potential for Steemit but is probably something to consider more seriously when I have a little bit more time ā