The Real-World Effect of NextJS on SEO

How converting my blog from vanilla React to NextJS affected SEO performance.

The Situation

For the past couple of years I’ve been publishing all my writing to my personal blog. A week or two after I’ve published on that site I’ll cross-publish to my Medium account using the import article tool.

By using Medium’s import tool the canonical link tag is set on the Medium version to point to my self-hosted blog. That’s basically the entire point of the import tool.

However, this dual-posting strategy creates an SEO tug-of-war between the two sites. Both have the same content but only one can show in search results. Which one shows up is, of course, chosen by Google.

Considering that more than 90% of all traffic to my posts is from organic search the winner of that battle will inherit virtually all traffic. This is one of my top performing posts. 98% of its views come from external referrals. Of which 75% of are Google.

The results of the SEO tug-of-war for the first 18 months of my blog looked like this.