From Instagram to a blog

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Linda Hogenes: Regarding moving the content: maybe you can crawl your posts using Screaming Frog with custom extractions. That would get it into a spreadsheet and easier to work with.Regarding with how many posts to start: at least a good amount.
• 
  Richard Hodge: Linda Hogenes your reply led me down a rabbit hole and am now looking at "IG Scrapers" (most which I am sure are used for less-than-noble reasons, lol) but at the end of the day, can get me quickly to my goal.
• 
  Linda Hogenes: Good luck!
• 
  Richard Hearne: Can you remove the posts from IG? Are they indexed there? You wont be able to redirect, so if the content is indexed there you may have difficulty getting any organic traction from Google due to canonicalisation.
• 
  Richard Hodge: Richard Hearne Good point, I don`t even know if IG posts even get indexed. I wouldn`t have the heart to remove them considering the engagement they got and growth they promoted. Does that mean I`d have to rewrite every single post to avoid dupe content?!
• 
  Richard Hearne: You can quickly check if IG gets indexed by doing a site:www.instagram.com/your profile slug. I honestly am unsure if Google indexes IG - if not you`re good to go. If they do (there are results coming back from that site: query), then you will probably have problems getting traction from Google. Rewriting may defeat the purpose of the exercise?
• 
  Richard Hodge: Richard Hearne It does not index posts, just the account itself.
• 
  Richard Hearne: Well then your quids-in. You just need to republish your IG content onto your own domain and see if Google likes it
• 
  Richard Hodge: Richard Hearne Then my original question remains...say if I have at my hands 400 posts ready to go. Should I go ahead and publish the 400 posts? Or perhaps only 100 to start, and drip-feed the remaining posts over time so Google notices the growing content on the site? It`s a big catch-22 for me.. on one hand I post all this content, and it`s more content that Google can index and be found. On the other hand, I know the algo rewards new content added as well. So that`s my conundrum here...
• 
  Richard Hearne: Richard Hodge that is an oft-asked question, and the best answer you`ll get is opinion and no more. FWIW I think you should consider all possible consumers of your content, and not just Google. If you want people to come to your site, then releasing 400 posts at once doesn`t really give them much to come back for. But having that much content may give you a lot of collateral with which to schedule posts and then leave your site on auto. The other aspect of releasing all at once - it`s very unlikely you`ll do any cross-linking within those posts. Drip-feed might give you extra opportunities to edit unreleased posts, including links to previously released posts. Internal linking is something that can help with ranking. But at the end of the day - don`t let the tail wag the dog. Google is not the be-all and end-all.
• 
  Richard Hodge: Richard Hearne Thank you for the insight. Absolutely agree, I grew the IG account to around 30k very engaged followers and am hoping that the drip feed will keep the interest going the same on the blog. I also agree that there`s a lot of opportunity to improve old posts. Case in point- IG only allows up to 2200 characters...that not a lot of content for a blog post, so occasionally I can spice up some posts with more content and inner linking as you suggested. OK I will bother you no further
• 
  Richard Hodge: Just an update in case this helps someone, I discovered a tool that managed to scrape all 1360 of my posts from IG: Apify. It`s a bit techy and took some time to figure out but in roughly 30m I had it working and now all my posts are exported to a Google Sheet. Big time-saver!