To increase your reach, it could be worth your while to post some of your content on sites with more authority and more visitors than your own site. But it’s a good idea to think about how to do that. You may think ‘If many people see my post on a site like medium.com, they’ll automatically head over to my site to check out that post, increasing my traffic.’ But is that really the case?
You probably don’t want to end up with duplicate content, and it also isn’t in your best interest to be competing with high authority sites. So, how can you use these platforms, like Medium, to your advantage? Let me tell you what I think in today’s Ask Yoast!
Tsahi Levent-Levin emailed us a question on crossposting content on Medium:
There seems to be a trend of placing a post on a blog and then republishing the exact same content on medium.com. As there’s no ability to control the canonical tag, how do you view this practice? Does it increase reach and discoverability or does it dilute ranking due to duplicate content?
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!
Rectification: It appears that you can set a canonical link on Medium! So please add it and prevent duplicate content by doing so.
Should you crosspost your content on Medium?
“Let me be very honest. It’s dumb, don’t do it. Medium is a platform that you do not control. It can probably outrank your own site because they have a lot of authority. So if you can have the reach on your own site, by all means go for that.
If you don’t have the reach on your own site, then write the content purely on Medium and point them to articles on your own site that are related, but are not the same. Having the same content in two places doesn’t really help anyone. Good luck.”
Ask Yoast
In the series Ask Yoast, we answer SEO questions from our readers. Have an SEO-related question? Maybe we can help you out! Send an email to [email protected].
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Read more: ‘What to do if the traffic on your blog is decreasing?’ »