Custom Domains, an Impression.

It’s about a week since Medium release the custom domains publicly. The steps to use your own domain is simple. It’s just a few clicks steps, ohh, and few typing as well :). They already written a guidance for this.

I asked for custom domains, right after they made a press release about custom domains. Here’s my impressions so far.

Note: I exposed some IP addresses in this post, if this is something that violate Medium policy, please let me know.

IP Addresses

My email got answered few hours later. I was surprised that I have to add 12 ip addresses to my A record. Well, not so pleasant, but it’s also means that my domain have power horse backends (AWS EC2).

> dig kodepot.com +nocomments +nocmd +nostats
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.0.16.118
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.1.119.170
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.1.147.205
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.1.173.203
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.4.145.119
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.4.175.111
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.4.225.124
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.4.240.221
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.4.38.70
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.5.181.79
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.6.3.192
kodepot.com. 418 IN A 52.6.46.142

SSL Certificates

Pointing your domain as custom domains also means you get a free SSL certificates. I found that recent domains will have Comodo RSA PositiveSSL, while the older registered domains will have DigiCert SHA2, plus wildcard version for root domain (I see you thenib.com ^^).

Since we get the a SSL and they need to set the certificate to the server, so please relax yourself when you see an error like:

Once SSL is installed the error will be gone, forever!.

What About SEO?

Yeah, for some people, SEO is another consideration before moving their domain. Is Medium custom domains SEO friendly? I will use thenib.com as the example:

I use thenib.com because my domain is not yet crawled by Google.
Using site:thenib.com on Google search.

As You can see all of the search results contains “A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt”. Hmm, is robots.txt responsible for this chaos?.

Surprisingly the content of robots.txt is:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /_/
Disallow: /m/
Disallow: /me/
Disallow: [email protected]$
Disallow: [email protected]/
Disallow: /*/*/edit
Sitemap: https://medium.com/static/sitemap.xml

I don’t see any rule that restrict access to thenib.com pages. Because I don’t have an access to thenib’s webmaster tools, so I tried using my own domain, which having same robots.txt.

kodepot.com on Google webmasters tools

I have no exact answer for this now. I guess this is something on the Medium server side, but again, I am not sure.

Another thing, as you can see above Sitemap is always pointing to same url, https://medium.com/static/sitemap.xml. Which means you can’t submit it to Google since it’s not your actual Sitemap.

So?

That’s some of the details when you use custom domains on Medium. Is it good? basically, depends on your needs.

If you affraid of losing visitors from organic search, not have enough strength to build traffic from viral world like social media, forum, etc. Please be safe, by keeping your current setup.

Otherwise, if you’re OK with living without Sitemap, no results on Google search page, brave enough to attract new visitors from Medium community, etc. Then go ahead by pointing your domain to Medium.

Me? I brave enough to deliver a programming tutorial site using Bahasa Indonesia, called kodepot.com, using Medium custom domains ;).