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15 Comments

Stop Blogging on Medium if You Care about SEO

  1. 7

    Medium can be useful in getting the word out to more people especially if you syndicate your content through one of the Medium Publications that have a large audience.

    For SEO purposes, always publish the content on your own site first and then use Medium's "Import" feature to get it into Medium (you can find it in "Stories" under "Import a story").

    Imported posts automatically apply a canonical URL which references the source URL. This consolidates the duplicate articles and makes sure your original article gets the search engine benefits.

    1. 2

      The problem with importing is that the import process maintains the blog timestamp. Even if you post to your blog and import on the same day, you can encounter a problem if you submit your draft to a Medium publication that takes a few days to accept and publish. The timestamp will be the original blog timestamp, which means your post will not appear at the top of the recent posts for the publication.

      There is no way around this that I've found. Workarounds from previous years no longer work. Even deleting and resubmitting to Medium without importing doesn't work, as the content is recognised as the deleted post and still maintains the old timestamp.

  2. 4

    Totally agree with all the claims made in this post. It's why I built imprint.to!

    1. 2

      Cool, I just signed up and syndicated my blog posts there. I like this more than Medium.

    2. 1

      Been loving Imprint! Definitely recommend

    3. 1

      Interesting concept, how hard has it been to get writers to list there stuff there? And are you basically going to be a link aggregator?

  3. 2

    Developers can blog on Medium and just set the canonical URL to their website's post and there is no harm done. This is an extremely common way to syndicate content, not just in Medium but on all sorts of online publications. You might want to include that in your blog post so people who want to syndicate to other sources know how to do it properly.

    Medium explains exactly this here:
    https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/217991468-About-SEO-and-duplicate-content

    Also, maybe you missed this because it's a somewhat recent Google update (September 2019): Nofollow links are not weighted as much as dofollow links, but they do count for something. Perhaps with Medium they will respect it, but it not accurate to make a blanket statement about nofollow links deprive your site 100% of passed authority.

    https://searchengineland.com/google-to-treat-nofollow-link-attribute-as-a-hint-after-march-1-2020-321664

    On whole I agree that developers would be better off learning SEO and blogging on their own websites and benefitting directly from backlinks, but I think the article is missing a fair bit of nuance in favor of a somewhat sensationalist headline :/

    (Also, I don't know if you know this, but most countries legally require you to disclose affiliate links in your articles. Even if it's not legally required in Poland, it's still considered a best practice in being transparent with your readers.)

    1. 1

      Thanks for pointing out but I disclose this info in blog terms https://pawelurbanek.com/terms

  4. 1

    Don't you think that if you publish on Medium or somewhere out of your blog, you actually build backlinks to your product (because you always mention it your articles)?

  5. 1

    This is a really nice write up Paweł!

    Add in that Medium now adds friction to visitors with their massive popups and paywalls, it's becoming a terrible platform for blogging in general, let alone SEO.

    Indiehackers, startups, and makers alike should all switch to hosting their own blogs if at all possible. I personally build them on Webflow, but their are plenty of easy to use platforms (Ghost is another great one!).

    If you're reading this and want to start your blog, but are unsure about what to write about, I've just launched a new project over at keywordsfast.com. We'll provide you with a keyword report for your site, showing you the exact words you should use in your content for maximum effect!

  6. 1

    Unfortunately, all the jekyll template links in the article are dead...

    1. 1

      Thanks for spotting, fixed

  7. 1

    Hmmm, I'm not sure you have some real experience in SEO. Because Medium is awesome for SEO, and getting traffic,...
    But I guess it's a clickbait article, with many of your service and affiliate link in your article.

    1. 1

      Medium does absolutely nothing for your own domain though.

      If you have a website and want it to rank then you need to create content on your domain that Google can index. Content on Medium is on Medium's domain, without setting a canonical URL any traffic or rankings boost won't affect your domain just the content on Medium.

      EDIT

      Medium does support canonical URLS from their import feature so I was wrong in my original comment saying they didn't, it's important to use this then to get any SEO benefit from posting to Medium otherwise it won't help your own domain.

      https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/217991468-About-SEO-and-duplicate-content

  8. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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