What I learned from getting republished on lifehacker

I recently wrote a short article here discussing the benefits of a low tech break routine versus normal web surfing. After posting on Hacker News, it stuck in the top spot all day for soem reason. I was delighted! It seemed like my subject was open ended and common enough to interest a large part of the community.

The following Monday, I received a tweet from the “editor-in-cheif” at Lifehacker, asking if I minded if the republished my article. I wasn’t an avid reader of the site, but I said yes without hesitation anyways. Being “republished” sounded cool, and I had heard of Lifehacker, so why not? I could try to play it cool here, but the truth is I was pretty pumped to be part of Lifehacker and curious to see what affect this might have on my site.

Also Monday, I glanced at the analytics, curiously wondering how much traffic Hacker News had solicited. I was astonished. My lowly blog spiked by more than 400% the day that article flourished on HN. After that, of course, the traffic settled back down to a more reasonable level (still a net gain).

I must admit only at this time did I take a few moments to investigate Lifehacker. It seems like republishing is sort of their bread and butter… A time tested technique for all sorts of seedy blogs on the web, the difference being they ask permission and give proper attribution. At this time my synacism kicked in and thought how hey essentially be making money with my content. Well ok, that how any business works, an it’s not like I sell ads on my site (yet anyways) so why should I care? Feeling a bit better about everything, left it alone and decided to forget about it for a few days.

More comments came in! The first sign of fresh traffic! Then some interesting
trackback links were submitted. I noticed many of them were from other duplicate republished articles.

I tested to see how much my post had been duplicated with this Google query. There’s not a ton of results, but mroe than I expected. At the time of my query, I counted seven duplicate posts from unknown sources and two from Lifehacker which I expected. I didn’t expect that all the duplicate results would rank above the original (mine) but perhaps I should considering my blog is fairly young.

It appears likely there are some sites that just copy anything Lifehacker publishes, which is evidently a solid seo strategy, considering many of them rank pretty decently. Grain of salt. It’s something web publishers have to tolerate until Google cuts them out completely I guess.

On a positive note, Lifehacker did give me a bump in traffic (although it was less than 1/5 of what HN drove) and it legitimized the blog somewhat.

Moral of the story? Like most things in life, it’s not black or white, but shades of grey. I’ll take the bad with the good. Duplicated content is a small price to pay for the fun of contributing readers and the interest of others.

Did anyone have a similar experience? Tell me about it.