WHAT IS REBLOGGING?
For anyone who doesn’t use blogs and has very little idea what I’m babbling on about, reblogging is a feature of certain free blogging platforms, which allows users to re-post anything they find on that platform, straight to their own ‘blog’, usually with no more than two or three mouse clicks. The feature means that even those who don’t create any material of their own can compile ‘blogs’ full of secondhand content. I suppose technically, reblogging is to writing and imaging what DJing became to music. A way of assembling pre-existing creations into a personalised collection. People who only reblog the work of others often have a much higher quality of content on their ‘blogs’ than those who only post their own material, because they can cherry-pick the best posts, from the best creatives. In a broad sense across the Web, reblogging is constantly gaining momentum. It’s very quick, it’s very easy, and maintaining high quality is effortless.
Within the Tumblr community, reblogging is generally (but not universally) taken as a compliment by the originator of the work. On WordPress, reblogging is much more likely to seriously annoy the original uploader. The two sites have different cultures, and it’s not unheard of for people who reblog posts on WordPress to be approached by the content creator with a request (or a demand) that they remove the reblogged post. It’s also the case that on WordPress, people seem a lot more shy and perhaps intimidated about reblogging the work of others.
One likely reason for the difference in attitudes is that the typical WordPress user is much more mature (in terms of age, at least) than the average Tumblr user, and will be more familiar with the stricter and more formal copyright controls of yesteryear. Another reason is probably that WordPress didn’t introduce reblogging until long after the platform became well established, and that meant a very large number of existing users were forced to accept that their work could be re-posted, without permission, and against their will. Even now, although reblogging on WordPress does not typically reproduce more than an excerpt from the original post, and a WP reblog is effectively a promo for the original uploader’s site, it’s seen by a wide array of WordPress users as copyright theft.
I should stress, however, that reblogging is a different prospect for photo-bloggers than for those who write. If you're only putting a single image in each post, and maybe a one-line caption, there's nothing to 'truncate', and visitors can see the whole post in any reblog. There's therefore no impetus for visitors to click through to the originating site. For photo-bloggers, reblogging is not anywhere near as good a deal as it is for writers.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH REBLOGGING?
As perceived by the original poster, the main concern is that the work will be devalued by way of mass duplication. There are different theories on how the search engines view duplicate content and how the duplicates affect the original work. There’s little doubt that with Google, duplicates of an original post are awarded low status. So if you make a blog which predominantly comprises other people’s work, you ain’t gonna get much of a presence on Google – if any. Google wants new material – not more of what it’s already got.
However, there is a theory that the original post’s status is also affected adversely when someone duplicates it. This is a pretty widespread view, but with Google’s current algorithms I’ve yet to see any evidence of it being true.
It looks to me, with the one-off instances of duplication I’ve been able to study, as if the original post is either completely unaffected or so marginally affected as for the difference to be unnoticeable. And that’s pretty logical, taking into account that reblogging is now a way of life in some quarters of the Web. The fact that an original post has been extensively reblogged doesn’t make it less valuable to the Web surfer. In fact if anything it makes it a more important find because it’s clear people have taken a great interest in it. To facilitate the best quality search, it would not make sense for Google to ‘handicap’ original content which gets reblogged. ‘Handicapping’ the copies makes complete sense because no Web surfer wants to find twenty instances of the same post at the expense of variety. But an original post which is subsequently reblogged should, at least in logical terms, maintain its full search engine status and presence.
Of course, search engines aren’t the only ways people can find posts, and duplication does devalue things if only on the basis of supply and demand. If a post is exclusive to you, then almost inevitably that post is going to have more real terms value than if about a thousand other blogs also have it.
On that basis, it seems unfair for blog hosts to force bloggers to allow their posts to be reblogged. But I suppose if the hosts provided a means for users to disallow reblogs, the vast majority of original content providers would protect their posts and there’d be very little available for legitimate reblogging. There’s also of course the fact that no one forces bloggers to use Tumblr or WordPress. They can, if they wish, use Google’s Blogger platform, where there’s no reblog feature.
SO HOW D’YOU STOP PEOPLE REBLOGGING YOUR WORK?
Technically, you can’t. On both Tumblr and WordPress the reblog feature can’t be disabled, so if someone wants to reblog your post, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. What you can do, is take steps to ensure they either won’t want to reblog your post, or won’t find it.
REBLOGS ON TUMBLR
On Tumblr, most other users who find your work will do so either because they’re following you, or because you’ve tagged your post and they’ve searched one or more of your tags. So to cut down dramatically on the incidence of other users finding your posts in the first place, you can make sure your blog is not followed, and avoid using tags. It’s unlikely you’ll get many followers in any case if you don’t use tags and you don’t follow others. If you do get the odd follower here or there, however, Tumblr allows you to block them.
Naturally, the consequences of having no followers and giving people very little chance of finding your posts internally on Tumblr, will be that you completely cut yourself off from the Tumblr community. So if you want to get your blog found, you MUST use search engine optimisation (SEO) and/or other forms of networking, such as Twitter or the special interest forums. I suspect most people who don’t want their posts reblogged will have reached such a decision primarily for SEO reasons anyway, so they’ll probably have an SEO plan at the ready from the start. Tumblr can actually provide very good free blogging facilities, offering those who are able to code HTML/CSS a lot more than WordPress.com offers – including the option to monetise their content for free. If you just use Tumblr as a bare-bones blog host, ditch its networking side and connect with the wider world via search and social media, I’d expect the incidence of Tumblr users reblogging your posts to be low. It's almost like having your blog on another platform.
Is the lack of tags in your posts going to hinder your SEO? Well, Google don’t seem to regard tags with much importance, and in fact I tried an experiment on this blog in which I didn’t add any tags at all to a series of nine posts. The untagged posts are found just as easily on the search engines as the tagged posts, and they show no noticeable deficiency in hits. In fact, a couple of the untagged posts have performed exceptionally well in attracting visits to the site. Google’s main interest these days is body text, I’m absolutely convinced. The only reason I resumed adding tags on this blog is that no one really knows what the future holds. If some tag-lovin’ upstart search engine comes along and kicks Google’s ass, I don’t want to be in a position where I’d have to go through hundreds of posts adding tags. But seriously, in my opinion tags are now virtually meaningless to Google when it comes to content with substantial body text.
For reference, on Tumblr, the tagging system is instantaneous. Remove a tag from a post, and immediately that post will be withdrawn from any internal Tumblr tag search for that specific tag. On WordPress there’s a delay. If you remove a tag from a post now, you’ll have to wait for the host to re-index before your post disappears from the WordPress Reader tag search. That’s one of a number of ways in which Tumblr's privacy system makes mincemeat of WordPress. WordPress doesn't, for example, allow users to block followers, or to delete their accounts.
WANT NOT MY BLOG POST
So we’ve now decimated the total of Tumblr users who are going to find your content. Some may still find it on the search engines in the conventional manner of course, but you can deter them from wanting to reblog your work in a number of ways…
Firstly, you’re more likely to be reblogged on Tumblr if you publish Photo Posts as opposed to Text Posts. Posts made in Text format, with substantial body text are less likely to be reblogged than pictorial memes. Longer text posts do get reblogged if they’re incisive or very funny, but generally, rebloggers on Tumblr want impactive pictures or funny memes which show at full size in their followers’ timelines and fit in with the sharp and fast look of their ‘blogs’. The only type of post which reproduces pics at full size on the Tumblr timeline is the Tumblr Photo Post (subject to the pref settings of the receiving user). Post in any other format and, statistically at least, you make your work less likely to be reblogged. Text Posts just don’t have the impact of Photo Posts in the Tumblr timeline – which is the only place a lot of Tumblr users will be looking.
You can feasibly render your photos of less appeal to Tumblr rebloggers by adding a watermark or your site branding. But there’s a fine balance to strike when you’re watermarking pictures. You may want to put other people off re-posting your photos, but you don’t want to put your site visitors off looking at them. I certainly wouldn’t recommend the sort of ridiculous repetitive branding sometimes seen on Flickr, in which the whole of the photo is literally concealed behind someone’s ‘tiled’ and recurring copyright notice. Most ironically, when you actually strip away all the text to unearth the pictures underneath this copyright barrage, they’re so often the most dreadful, dull, lopsided, uninspiring images, which only a complete fool would want to re-post anyway.
How much of a deterrent adding a watermark to your photos would be to rebloggers is difficult to gauge. Some won’t care; others will prefer images without any form of site branding. But it’s worth adding a watermark or branding strip anyway, for the reasons I mentioned in my Photo Blogging Article.
Another measure you can take on Tumblr to avoid being reblogged is to use a secondary blog rather than your primary blog. Your primary Tumblr blog is the one which identifies you to other Tumblr users. Unlike a secondary/additional blog, it can’t be password protected or deleted. But when you set up additional Tumblr blogs, they’re somewhat detached from the community in that other users don’t see them when you Follow or Like. All your Following and Liking is done in the name of your primary Tumblr blog, so by using a secondary/additional blog to post your main content, you can still Follow and Like on Tumblr without other users discovering your content internally. That is, of course, provided you don’t tag your posts. If you tag your posts, they should show up in a Tumblr search whichever blog you use to make them.
WORDPRESS AND TUMBLR
One very powerful deterrent to rebloggers on any platform is to use formatting which other people’s blogs can’t by default reproduce. This doesn’t stop people actually reblogging your posts, because they may not realise you’ve used custom formatting. But when they complete the reblog it’ll look so terrible on their site that they end up deleting it straight away. Even a cursory look at the process of adding custom formatting would be an article in itself, but below you can see an example on an experimental WordPress blog, which I formatted as a spoof forum.
The formatting only holds if it’s posted exclusively in the HTML Editor (on Tumblr that would mean someone setting their user prefs to Plain Text rather than the default Rich Text), which very few if any rebloggers will be doing. So when the posts are reblogged, they lose their formatting, can become disorganised, and in some cases barely make sense. Any HTML/CSS tutorial site will be able to give you some ideas for custom formatting, afterwhich it’s just a case of experimenting. The basic idea is to get your posts to look brilliant on your own blog, and dreadful on anyone else’s. You may have to be careful, however, as too much formatting waffle and too little actual content might not make your site best friends with Google.
Another, perhaps easier option which can give your posts a kind of built-in reblog-repellant, would be to insert headers into your posts. I’ve recently been experimenting on Tumblr with image headers. You simply start each post with an image, which comprises text identifying your blog. It’s a clever idea, because this header is going to reproduce right at the top of a reblog, and it acts as little more than an ad for your blog. You can even make the image clickable as a link! Does a reblogger want what’s essentially a big, clickable advert for your blog on their page? My experiment suggests not. So far, only one of my posts with an image header has been reblogged, and the reblog was immediately deleted.
It’s almost like watermarking a post. I say “almost”, because it’s a lot easier to delete a clickable image from a post than it is to remove watermarking from a photo. But can rebloggers be bothered to fiddle around editing the posts they reblog? Most often, I suspect not. The only potential negative is that repeatedly posting the same image in every post could have a detrimental effect on SEO. However, lots of posts on the blog you’re on now incorporate the same promo image (as a footer), and I experienced no drop in visits whatsoever after inserting those images. As long as your header/footer isn’t virtually the only thing in each post and there’s a substantial amount of well-optimised, original content for Google to index, I doubt it will cause a problem.
The old trick of stuffing each and every post with links to other articles on your blog can be another deterrent to rebloggers, but it can also be a lot more beneficial to you if anyone does reblog your posts. Having 10 links per reblog placed on someone else’s page is much better than having just one – both in terms of advertising your blog posts to potential new readers and in terms of search engine optimisation. Putting a few links very near the top of your posts means that if the posts are truncated by the reblog process, you still get your backlinks.
CONCLUSION
So whilst there’s no way you can flat-out block other Tumblr or WordPress.com users from reblogging your posts, you can make it pretty unlikely that it’ll happen in anything more than the odd, isolated instance. You may of course love the idea of being reblogged, and if that’s the case, you can pretty much do the opposite of everything I’ve suggested in this article. If you do like the idea of being reblogged, Tumblr is definitely your site. Set up a Tumblr blog and publish ten impactive Photo Posts with liberal and well-chosen tagging, and the odds of you getting reblogged run very close to inevitable. But not everyone creates content for the same reasons, and if you prefer to keep your work exclusive, want a free blog, but for whatever reason don't want to use Blogger, hopefully I've given you some ideas.
