If you’re already an established blogger, you should also be on Medium. It’s an ideal way to expand your audience, and potentially earn an extra income stream through the Medium partner program.
One of the nice things about Medium is that they have no problem with republishing articles, as long as you own the original article. They even provide an easy tool that allows you to import content from your own blog, and share it on the Medium platform.
Will importing content onto Medium hurt my SEO?
Having duplicate content on the Internet often hurts SEO. Search engines generally like to index one copy of a page. If you have your content in multiple places, it’s possible that another page will essentially steal traffic from the content on your own blog.
The good news is a Medium has thought about this. When you import content from your own blog to Medium, the site automatically includes a canonical link. This alerts search engines to the fact that the post on your own blog is the official version. Most search engines will index the post on your blog, not the one on Medium.
In a nutshell, that means you should get the benefits of publishing the content on Medium, without the drawbacks of damaging your own site’s SEO. As a benefit, the link at the end of the imported article on Medium provides a way for readers to quickly jump to your blog and continue reading more articles there.
Using the import tool
There’s a catch though. In order to import posts to Medium without damaging the SEO of your own blog, it’s essential to use Medium’s Import tool. If you just copy and paste the text and images from your existing blog over to Medium, the new post may be seen as duplicate content and may hurt your SEO.
Medium has simple instructions for using the import tool. It’s incredibly easy.
Go to your homepage on Medium, click your Profile picture, and go to Stories. Press Import a Story.
Enter the URL to the story on your blog, and click to import it. Medium automatically sets the date of the imported article to the date that you published the post on your blog.
One caveat; that means that when you look at your Medium stats, the post will display in the month that you were originally posted it on your own blog, not the month that you imported it to Medium.
After using the Import Tool, your post should appear as a Medium Draft.
Make sure to get formatting right
When you use the Medium import tool, Medium will take its best shot at formatting the post to match the site’s standards. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t get everything right. The title of your post might appear differently on Medium versus your blog, or some of your images may not be imported properly.
For that reason, it’s important to manually review each post that you import before you publish it. I like to use the import tool to bring a post over, and then go through it to ensure that all the images are present, the title is correct, there are no links that work on my own blog but not on Medium, etc.
I also like to write a new subtitle for my imported articles, and to assign tags to them on Medium before I publish them. Granted, these steps add a bit of extra work to the importing process. But it’s important to ensure that your post ends up looking great on Medium.
Only import posts that you own
One other important thing to keep in mind is that you can only import posts to Medium that you own. Make sure that you either wrote the post or have permission from its author before you import it. Importing posts that you don’t own or have the rights to could potentially land you in hot water with Medium, or the author.
Next steps
If you have an existing blog, go ahead and try importing some posts to Medium. You’ll get the benefit of engaging with Medium’s audience and potentially pick up new readers for your own blog, too. Because Medium is clever about how they do imports, it shouldn’t impact the SEO of your existing blog, either.
To do Medium imports right, though, make sure to use the official import tool. Don’t just copy and paste your content over. And once you do move it to Medium, make sure to check it over and clean it up so that it looks great in its new home.