converting from mu sitewide tags plugin

Not being familiar with Sitewide Tags, I can’t really say.

What does it do? Does it do any actual copying of posts between blogs or is it just referencing posts from different blogs on the tags blog?

At any rate, if you don’t wish to broadcast the posts one by one, mass broadcasting can be done either by using the Broadcast API (if you like to code) or using the Queue and Send To Many add-ons.

Hi thanks for your quick reply. MU Sitewide Tags is an old plugin developed by WP Core developers Donncha O Caoimh and Ron Rennick. It creates a duplicate of every subdomain post on the main domain site (There’s also an option create a tags.subdomain.com site). When you click on the frontend version of the post on the main blog, it takes you to the original post on the subdomain site. I.e., it redirects to subdomain URL. It also has an option for not indexing the main blog site to hide it from SE bots.

My motivation for switching is that some of my content originates on the main blog therefore hiding it from search engine bots is not good. On the other hand, having duplicate content visible to the search engine bots is also a problem. Your plugin seems to have more fine grain control to get around that problem. Also, MU Sitewide does seem likes it maintained.

So basically, my questions are:

1) What do I do with all that old duplicate content on main blog? Delete it?

2) Besides offering more fine grain control and options, does your plugin aggregate content from subdomains on the main site in multi-site networks by creating a duplicate on the main – the way that MU Sitewide tags does?

1. Yes, since it’s just a duplicate.

2. That’s up to you. You can broadcast posts between any blogs you want. If you want to broadcast your posts from all subsites to the main site – go right ahead! Or you can broadcast from the main site to subsites.

See this graph to see how you can broadcast posts: https://ps.w.org/threewp-broadcast/assets/screenshot-2.png?rev=1781393

Thank you. It’s a very sophisticated, well-maintained, and well-supported plugin. Why don’t you go premium with it? Anyway, my support follow up questions are, if I aggregate posts from the subs to the main, does it create duplicates on the main? If so, how do I hide those from search engines so that only the original URL is indexed in SEO? Is there another way to show excerpts on the main without creating duplicates?

Oh, but it is premium. In fact there are 97 add-ons available that make Broadcast so much more fun to use. ??

And the duplication isn’t a problem for search engines. Broadcast has an option to automatically output the canonical link of each broadcasted post. It’s in the Broadcast SEO settings.

I’m trying to convert. However I need to keep some of the duplicates on the main site for a reason related to another function. With the MU Sitewide Tags plugin activated, automatically output the canonical link of the sub-site post where they originated. When I deactivate the MU SW Tags plugin, they stop outputting the originating link. However, if I keep it activated, it keeps duplicating and I’m guessing that won’t play nice with the Broadcast plugin, i.e., I’ll be getting triplicates. Is there a way I can keep these old posts outputting the originating link? Is there a function in the Broadcast plugin? Or maybe I can figure out how to modify the MU SW Tags plugin so that it stops duplicating keeps on outputting the originating link?

You might not get duplicates.

As long as the posts have the same slugs on both blogs, you can link posts from the child blog to the main blog (or the other way round, perhaps).

See the “Find unlinked” post action here: https://broadcast.plainviewplugins.com/doc/post-actions/

With that function you can link existing posts together, which means you should be able to keep sitewide activated together with BC, even though it sounds like a bit of a pain having to continue using a plugin that has been abandoned.

Wow, interesting. Couldn’t I deactivate the old plugin then use this function to link the posts duplicated with the old plugin?

Sure, why not?