Content Marketing Strategy

Canonical Links: Actually, Medium Favors Writers and Bloggers

What are canonical links? Why do you need canonical links for your articles published on Medium?

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Content marketing strategy is vital for freelance writers and bloggers to grow.

I am inspired to write this article after receiving many inquiries from new writers. The term “canonical link” sounds exotic and seems jargon to some writers.

What is a canonical link?

Here is the latest inquiry from one of our engaging and prolific writers Delilah Brass on my article titled Not Telling You To Quit Medium, Just The Contrary! posted recently to ILLUMINATION.

Delilah’s question is far from stupid, in fact, it is very smart. Let me introduce the rationale behind using canonical links for your Medium articles.

Search engines automatically review and index billions of links on the Internet. During this process, if a crawler finds multiple copies of the same content, it assigns the copy as the original for the platform that has the highest domain authority.

As you may know, Medium has a very high domain authority (DA).

Here are screen captures comparing three sites giving voice to freelance writers. They are unique sites with different purposes, so our aim is not to compare their approach but compare how search engines perceive them.

Medium

Vocal Media

News Break

Criteria details in these charts are beyond the scope of this article. Thus I plan to create another article explaining them. However, for this article, I want you to pay attention to four criteria items:

DA (Domain Authority), PA (Page Authority), TB (Total Backlinks), IX (Number of Indexed URLs).

When you look at these four essential criteria points, you can understand why Medium content always gets priority over other platforms in search engines. Not many domains have five million backlinks on the Internet.

By the way, these stats reflect the current situation. They may change in the future based on the engagement rates in those platforms.

There are many apps to find these figures. When preparing this article, I used a free search guide websiteseochecker.com.

Purpose of using canonical links on Medium articles

A canonical link aims to signal to search engines that this content has been published on multiple sites, and this particular one is the main link. Adding canonical links to your articles will stop crawling your content by search engines.

Why does using canonical links matter to you?

It matters because you can use the traffic that your article generates for your business goals. These goals may vary based on your content marketing strategy. For example, one use case could be to introduce your newsletters to a new audience, obtain their email address, and convert them to be your potential customers.

As writers of this platform, we are fortunate as Medium allows us to create this vital signal when submitting our stories. Other platforms that I write for do not have this feature. Medium is ahead of the game and shows support to its creators. We should be grateful for this opportunity.

Here is Medium’s official position on canonical links:

“When posting content to multiple platforms at the same time (such as your website and Medium), it’s important to make sure a single source of that content is the ultimate authority. Medium’s official tools for cross-posting add the source it is importing from as the canonical link automatically, but you can also add your canonical link manually to your post. Search engines use canonical links to determine and prioritize the ultimate source of content, removing confusion when there are multiple copies of the same document in different locations. Sites that publish an overabundance of duplicate content without indicating a canonical link may be penalized in search engine rankings”. Source

How can you set a canonical link for your post on Medium?

Here are the steps with screenshots.

Step 1

Click on the … on the top right side of the screen on your story. This will take you to the edit mode of your post.

Step 2

Click on the “More settings” entry in this menu.

Step 3

Scroll down and find the “Advanced Settings” remark.

Step 4

Click on the “This story was originally published elsewhere” tick box.

Ensure the box is checked.

Step 5

Copy and paste the URL of your original article.

Step 6

Click on the Save canonical link button.

Step 7

And publish your article.

That is it.

How can you ensure that your Medium article has a canonical link?

When you have published your article, you can right-click on the article page. Then you click on “View page source”.

You can search for the term “canonical”.

The result will show the link to your original article.

You can also check the DNS-prefetch reflecting your website’s DNS address.

'dns-prefetch' href='//digitalmehmet.wordpress.com' />

Other Essential Considerations

As an additional signal, when I submit previously published material to Medium and Vocal Media, I always add a link pointing out that this story was originally published on another platform. One caveat, currently, News Break does not allow this as stories of some writers who added such links were not approved.

This consideration solved a fundamental problem for me when I started Vocal Media. For example, when I submitted a previous article published on Medium, they rejected my article due to plagiarism. The Vocal team initially did not know I was a writer for Medium. When I added a link saying that this story was published on another platform, I never had an issue with Vocal Media.

I also recommend writers of my publications add this remark as it saves a lot of time for our editors and speeds up the publishing process. Our editors regularly check submitted articles for duplication and plagiarism using various tools such as Duplichecker and Grammarly.

If your original story was published in another blog with a different account name, our editors would wait until you verify the original content belongs to you. This causes a delay in the publishing process. So you can prevent the hold by adding a link pointing out that you published the original content on another platform.

Conclusions

I introduced the purpose of using canonical links for your Medium articles. I also provided practical steps on how to create canonical links for your Medium posts.

This simple action is vital for your content marketing strategy. It takes only a minute or so when you get used to it. You can see the benefits in the long run.

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