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Canonical Links Don’t Work on Medium
The mysteries of search engines continue.
When syndicating your writing, using the canonical link is there to ensure the search engines direct traffic back to the original article wherever that may be, rather than where the content was syndicated. On Medium, you can insert the canonical link from the editor with the advanced options or use the import feature.
That is the theory of how canonical links work, but do they actually work? From my experience, not really.
I only learned about the canonical link a few months ago and started using them at Medium to direct traffic back to either my blogs, HubPages, or NewsBreak. After seeing many of my articles on Medium attracting decent search engine traffic, I have to conclude the canonical link didn’t work.
Maybe it works to help my blogs not get penalized with duplicate content, but what does that matter when the article on Medium gets the spotlight in the search results?
Sometimes I syndicate my NewsBreak articles on Medium with the canonical link and because of the nature of the articles, they are showing up in the search engines answering questions about Oregon. Instead of the NewsBreak article showing up and making me money, the Medium articles are showing up which doesn’t make me money.
