Are Legal Blogs Redunant?

I received this question about the redundancy of blogging through my website. It is not a question that is that unusual. I thought I might post the question here, as well as my response, to give some insight to others pondering a similiar question:

QUESTION: A blog seems redundant, if I am already writing articles which I send out on a regular basis. Is the difference just based on a blog being more informal?

ANSWER: For most people blogs are redundant. In my opinion, a blog should be spur of the moment postings and thoughts, easy reads, comments on current events, and summaries of more detailed work you have available on your website. YOU DO NOT want to repost items to your blog that appear on your website or other sites. You can be penalized in the page rank for having duplicate content all over the web (if you are trying to drive traffic to your site through search anyhow). If you are writing detailed articles, I would set a place aside on your website for those long form writings to appear. I would write abbreviated versions to appear on article submission sites and on your own blog. This avoids redundancy and shows you are providing content that IS NOT an exact duplicate all over the web. In my opinion some of the article submission sites are just taking traffic away from your site that should be arriving there naturally anyway. Most article submission sites generate revenue by placing Google ads (or some other form of advertising) throughout your work. If you are trying to be found online for the search string “medical malpractice litigation” and you write about that topic extensively and give that content to an article submission site, you are really only driving traffic to THEIR site with your article. If you just posted the “medical malpractice litigation” article on your own site, it would probably show up eventually to people searching that search string and people could come right to your site. Why send them to some 3rd party content displayer? As a side note, your page rank of articles that exceed 400 words will be greatly increased, so keep that in mind with anything you write (blogs, articles, abbreviated articles, etc).

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