Pages you published elsewhere

Not everybody has a website. Plenty of people have a body of work published on other people's platforms: Medium, Substack, a client's blog, a guest post they wrote last year.

If you can still add a link to a page, it is worth the same as a page on a site you own. Published articles is where you register those, described as "Articles you've published on platforms you don't own — Substack, Medium, someone else's blog. Register them here and other members can collaborate with you on them, links included."

Why bother

Three reasons.

It gives a writer with no site of their own something to swap with, which otherwise blocks them entirely.

It gives a site owner more to offer than their own pages.

And it opens those articles to collaboration requests, which is its own thing. See collaboration requests on published articles.

Adding one

Paste the address, and say what your relationship to the page is. That last question is the important one, because it decides how a link actually gets added later.

I can edit them directly. You can log in and make the change yourself.

The publisher makes changes. You ask, and somebody else edits.

There are narrower variants of the second, covering a publisher who has already authorised changes, and the case where you can only make an introduction.

Be honest here. A partner deciding whether to ask you for a link wants to know whether it will take an afternoon or a month, and the answer is shown to them.

You can add several at once, by pasting addresses or uploading a spreadsheet, and Rankbench reads each page for its title. Titles are what partners see, so fix any it got wrong before sharing.

Verification

Rankbench checks you can really update the article before collaborations are offered on it. Until that clears, the entry says it is pending verification.

This exists so that requests are only offered on articles somebody genuinely controls, which is the whole basis on which a partner agrees to anything.

Sharing them

A verified page can join your shared list, exactly like a page on your own site. In the list it carries a note saying where it lives and what access you have.

A workspace whose only shareable pages are published elsewhere can still ask for swaps. The request form says so when that is the case, so you know why the request looks slightly different.

What a partner cannot ask of them

Some rules cannot be met by a page on somebody else's platform, and the request form names them rather than failing mysteriously.

A partner whose rules restrict which countries or languages they accept cannot be satisfied by pages published elsewhere, because those carry neither.

And a page hosted on the partner's own domain is not a swap at all: a link from their site to their site is an internal link.

When the publisher has to make the change

If you cannot edit the page yourself, agreeing a link produces a link you send to the publisher. They see exactly what would change and answer in one click, with no account needed. See when the page is published somewhere you cannot edit.

Where to go next

Pages you share is the list these join. Collaboration requests on published articles is the other thing registering them unlocks.