If you have an Active Rain outside blog, you need to understand that displaying both the Local Posts links and the tags you assign to posts (shown as Categories on the outside blog) will negatively impact the SEO for your outside blog. 

If you don’t care why, take my advice:  Display only the Local Posts links in your outside blog side column.  Don’t display the tags you assigned to the post that display as Categories.

If you don’t mind a bit of techy-talk, read on to find out why!

How Active Rain Outside Blogs Treat Tags and Hyper-Local Links

Blog Tags – As of this writing, here’s how Active Rain treats the tags you enter when you write posts on your Outside Blog.

• The tags don’t appear in the code of the blog post pages except as a list of links called Categories.  Therefore, you are not really increasing the density of your keyword phrase by using the tags.
• If you reach a post page using the Category links, the post page’s link or page URL uses the tags.  So, for example, if you assigned the tags “Atlanta Real Estate, Market Statistics” to a post, when you reached that post using the Category links, the URL you would see at the top of your browser would be:
      http:// www. YourDomainName/post/1111111/Atlanta-Real-Estate-Market-Statistics

Hyper-Local Links

• When you write a blog post, you have the option of posting it to Hyper-Local pages.
• If you display those links on your outside blog, they are labeled as “Local Posts”
• If you reach a post page using the Local Posts link, the post page’s link or page URL uses the blog title.  So, continuing the example above, let’s say that you used the post title “June Atlanta Real Estate Market Report”, when you reached that post using the Local Posts link, the URL y0u would see at the top of your browser would be:
      http:// www. YourDomainName/post/1111111/June-Atlanta-Real-Estate-Market-Report

You can probably see the problem already:

• When the search engines follow both the Local Posts links and the Category links, they’re going to find one page with two different URLs. 
• When one page has two “domain names”, the search engines consider that to be duplicate content. 
• When you have duplicate content on one website, the search engines will penalize that site.

So, you can’t use both the Local Posts links and the Categories on an outside blog without SEO consequences.

Why Use the Local Posts Links on Your Outside Blog Display?

The way the Active Rain links are set up right now is a bit convoluted, and I’m sure they’ll be working to make things more consistent.

The Local Posts links on your outside blog should be the most potent.  The search engines will find the state/province links on the Active Rain home page.  From there, they will eventually end up at your post on the Hyper-Local pages, and they’ll find links back to your Active Rain blog. 

Surely, your posts will include links to your outside blog, main website, etc. etc.  I would also suspect that at some point, Active Rain will change the links on the hyper-local pages to go to your outside blog, where the search engines will find the same local links that they started following in the first place.

The Local Links should carry more authority with the search engines.  The tag/Category links are more useful on your regular Active Rain blog because they aren’t competing with Local Posts links for attention.

The bottom line is this:  If you don’t want to get in trouble with the search engines, display only the Local Posts links on your outside blog.

Here’s what happens when you write an Active Rain blog post:

Here’s where you’ll find the options for display in the sidebar on your Active Rain Outside Blog – using the Widget menu.  You don’t want to select both Local Posts and Categories.