Cross Posting 101 - Understanding TON Content Interacting among Sites

 What powers TON Sites and any website for that matter is content.  Content drives users and new, fresh, interesting and useful content brings them back.

The power of the TON Platform is, above all other things, its content management and distribution system.  As one TON Site grows all TON Sites grow because of the built in ability for TON Sites to leverage content from one another.

In TON, just about Everything is "Content".  Articles, Photos, Pages, Videos, Forums, Maps, Calendar Events, Business Listings, etc. etc. - Everything is content and everything extends and implements common features.

The TON Cross posting system, at its most basic level, allows Web Site A to display, or "Cross Post" just about anything from Web Site B.

As a site manager, it is critical to understand this interaction in order to make best use of content from other sites, and, to control how content that you publish behaves on other TON Sites.

The other crucial consideration is that any TON Site can link to content from any other TON Site - It is the settings below that will tell the system how to act when that happens.


The following items/settings control how content is cross-posted.

• Added By Site - Every content has an "owning site" or the site that added it.  The owning site controls the content.
• Additional Sites - A list of additional site in which a content item will appear.  Most lists, articles boxes, search pages, etc. use this parameter when pulling in content.  Adding a site to this list will help to automatically deliver the content.
• ForceOriginalSite - Setting this to true tells TON that the owning site wants to be the only one that displays this content.  Other sites can link to it, but the links will open the item on the original site, instead of the sending site
• Cross Post Display Permissions - Special permissions that can be applied that allow or deny sites the capability to display an item that has been flagged with ForceOriginalSite

 

In addition to these settings, Forums, Forum Topics and Fishing/Hunting Reports have some additional groupings that deliver them across multiple TON Sites.

The Additional Sites List

On your home page, you might have an article box.  That article box basically says this: "Give me a list of all articles that my site owns or wants"  
When the article box is choosing which articles to display for Web Site A, it will query the articles list saying "select all articles where AddedBySite='Web Site A' or AdditionalSiteList has 'Web Site A' in it"

This is the the power of the additional sites list field.  It allows a site owner (or a content owner) to tell other sites to go ahead and display this content on their sites.

As long as ForceOriginalSite is not checked, clicking on the link to the article will display it directly on any site that links to it.

The Permalink

One thing you will notice about cross posted content is that when displaying on any TON Site other than the site that owns it, an Permalink will appear somewhere on the page.  Normally you will see this near the top, or on the description box.  The permalink is a link to the exact same article back on the site that owns it.

This serves 2 purposes:

1. To ensure that users know that this content was created on another site
2. To ensure that search engine's know that this is "duplicate content" to ensure the original site gets more "credit" than the TON Sites that are cross posting it.

Force Original Site

Its your content, and many times, you want it to only appear on your site.  But at the same time, you want users from other TON Sites to be able to find it.

It is the Force Original Site option that gives you this power.  With this option you can say "Yes - Allow the other sites to list my article, BUT, when they click on it, redirect them to my site"

It is the ForceOriginalSite setting for all content that will accomplish this task.  Instead of Web Site A displaying an article from Web Site B, Web Site A will redirect the user back to Web Site B - therefore giving Web Site B the traffic.

Force Original Site as the Default

By default, when you post an article, the ForceOriginalSite flag is un-checked.  You can change this behavior by changing your default settings in your sites Cross-Post Settings tab

To edit your Cross Post Settings, in the admin center:

Sites -> Manage Sites -> Click on your Site -> Click the Cross Posting tab

On the Cross Posting Tab, you will be presented with a list of checkboxes for various types of content.  Selecting any of these checkboxes, will then set the ForceOriginalSite flag to be checked on all NEW content that you publish.

Important Note:  This flag is not retro-active, which means it will not go and apply the ForceOriginalSite setting to content you have already published.

Cross Post Display Permissions

Now things don't always work or act the way you want them to in every case, which is why we have created the Display Permissions capability to give you even finer control over how your content is displayed.

Let's say that by default, you have the ForceOriginalSite flag checked for all articles you publish.


Now, you are working with the site manager for Web Site B, and you decide that you want to give Web Site B the ability to display your articles, but you don't want any of the other web sites to display them (you want the other sites to link back).

This permission is handled by adjusting individual cross posting permissions in 2 areas.   On the content itself, or in the Site Cross Post settings tab.