What do you do when you put a lot of work into crafting a piece of content and then a publication puts it online, in an infinite scroll of links that sends you back to your friend’s linkbook of other works by you? What if you aren’t given the option to display the story you wrote?

Republishing a piece of content is different than just removing a link. Republishing a piece is like editing or publishing a prior version of a post or blog post before it is published and made publicly available.

It is more widespread than you may think. Many websites, including the Huffington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, The Atlantic, USA Today, the Guardian, and TechCrunch, have the capability to let users republish a post in its entirety. There are many reasons a website may make such a decision. What may be most important is what you do with that post.

Do you republish a whole post or just a select few sentences or lines? Remember that your target audience would never ask for, encourage, or click on extended quotes, articles, links, etc. An example post that may come up in your options might be written by Harry Potter writer J.K. Rowling, in which she once described herself as an “ultra-privileged creature.”

If the article is the old version that the published version is the extension, the Extended version will show the deleted words and sentences. Your choice of whether to republish or only part of the post is based upon your experience as the author of the original. If you decided to shorten and re-use long sentences or paragraphs and created specific headlines and tags, then you may choose to keep the long version as it is.

If, on the other hand, you decided to write anything from your personal blog using some of the same sentences or concepts in your longer posts, you may be able to avoid this dilemma. If you have published your blog, whether old or new, you can set up a Google Drive account for your blog using the http://drive.google.com/acc… and login using your username or email address, and use the upload box to share and archive your blog posts.

While you should always ensure that you are the sole author of all content posted by you, that is not a foolproof way to keep your work safe from the tenacious eyes of tens of thousands of web readers. That should not prevent you from sharing and republishing your work for your purposes. If a website has not given you the option to republish a post, it may be due to the reason below.

You have no control over the original content of the article you posted. You cannot read through your published blog content to find if any part of it was republished. You do not even know if anyone else posted a substantial excerpt from the original post or made their own changes to what you wrote.

This possibility might have been a potential scenario even before the current MeToo scandal in Hollywood, but it is definitely now a major news story. The fact that both Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey were accused of sexual assault from numerous women, including alleged incidents of rape, has caused people to wonder about the credibility of anyone who is accused of rape. The fact that they didn’t claim any sexual assault from you might indicate that you’re not credible and send internet readers back to your original work, including your deleted words and sentences.

Whether this was intentional on the publisher’s part, or an error, it is a serious situation that is not easily fixed. Republishing is a voluntary service and the websites using it are not obligated to post the same piece of content as when it was originally published. Do not expect to control the final look of your writing. Many websites may not want to risk facing more abuse from audience members, and some may simply want to keep their regular posts flowing uninterrupted.

The onus for checking your republished content belongs to you. If you decide that you want to republish a blog post, do it, and see how that works out. The good news is that you may find that you can republish a piece for your own purposes and still give your blog readers the same experience.

iReprinted from The Merced Sun-Star with permission from the author.