, a content management system that doubles as an email-service provider, and began publishing everything she sent out via Substack on Ghost as well."A search engine doesn't know what the true source of authority is, and duplicate content can be perceived as a cheat," she explained in a. "But I was confident in my ability to canonicalize my pages and manage both systems, at least for a little while.
In August, when checking on a different experiment, Carver noticed that her Ghost website had been accruing organic traffic. Even though she had posted the same content to Substack and Ghost, and despite the fact that she had not published on Ghost since April, Carver found that traffic to the site was four times higher than than the traffic to her Substack, according to documents reviewed by Business Insider.
After posting duplicate content to Ghost and Substack, Carver found that the same material on Ghost attracted four times as many organic visitors as it did on Substack.that she was leaving Substack for Ghost. As a self-respecting content technologist, she could not in good faith continue to use a platform whose porous search engine optimization was costing her thousands of potential readers, she wrote.
According to Carver, this means that for all the work a writer might put into a Substack post, its lifespan of SEO relevance is incredibly short.