New Writer’s Crash Course #1: How to Get Indexed on Medium
How long does it take for Medium to index new writers?
I’ve faced a number of hurdles in my first few weeks of being a new writer — everything from no one reading my articles, to dealing with Medium’s new rule changes, to struggling to find the answers to some basic questions on how to best use this platform.
But should it really be this hard?
After discovering this publication, New Writers Welcome — I felt a surge of hope. What a brilliant idea, to start a publication dedicated to the voices of new writers! Inspired by Robert Ralph’s resilience in turning obstacles into opportunities, I felt the urge to contribute to the new writer community too.
I wanted to create a crash course where I would share everything I’ve learned so far. Currently, too much of this knowledge is either vaguely worded in Medium’s Help section, or locked up behind a paywall (more on that below). I hope this Crash Course series will help make the path forward much smoother for the next group of new writers!
Today, I wanted to dive into the most vexing hurdle I’ve faced so far: why Medium was not indexing my articles as a new writer. Meaning, none of them were searchable — not within Medium, nor on the wider web.
The Waiting Game
I published my first article after joining Medium three weeks ago, eager to start my new blog on storytelling tips. On a whim, I tried searching for the article within Medium, wondering how many other similar stories there were out there. Since my article was titled: Shang-Chi Review: 10 Storytelling Lessons to Improve Your Writing, I searched for “Shang-Chi storytelling”.
Nothing came up.
Hmm. I shortened the search to “Shang-Chi story”. Three other articles appeared — but none were mine. Okay, so the search tool was obviously working, but just not able to find my article. Finally, I tried just searching for my name: “Dancy Fu”.
Still NOTHING! Ack! What’s going on here??
I found this article in the Medium Help section, which explains that this is all perfectly normal, and that I would need to do far more than simply publish ONE article, if I expect to convince Medium that I’m not a spam bot or company trying to take advantage of Medium’s high domain authority for their own gain:
“Medium limits content that is made available to third-party search engines, as well as Medium’s native search and topic pages. The overwhelming majority of content that Medium will no longer be allowing to be indexed is what most people would consider spam.
It may take a little bit of time for you as a creator to become a trusted part of the Medium network and meet the threshold for being indexed … We encourage you to continue publishing your best writing on Medium, engaging with other users by clapping, following, and responding, and becoming a part of the Medium community.”
Further down the page, there’s a FAQ question that clarifies just how long “a little bit of time” is:
“Days to weeks”? That sounds far more ominous than “a little bit of time.”
According to a poll that I ran recently in this publication’s Facebook group, this only seems to be a problem plaguing new writers who joined after the August 11 rule change, not before.
Still, I took this in stride. I understood where Medium was coming from. See, Medium throws this curveball at you because it doesn’t know you yet. As a newbie, Medium needs to figure out if you’re a good egg (a real person, someone who simply wants to share their stories with the world), or a bad egg (spam bot or company looking to profit off of Medium’s hard-earned high domain authority).
Medium has also spelled out how they’re going to separate the wheat from the chaff: by gathering “internal signals” that look at how much you’re publishing, and most importantly, how much you’re engaging with the Medium community, via “clapping, following, and responding”.
No sweat, I was going to do those things anyway!
Pay to Engage
So I started reading articles on Medium. That’s when I realized I needed to be a paying member in order to do this.
So many of the articles I wanted to read were behind the paywall. Plus, with Medium’s Help section being mostly too vague on addressing the most essential questions asked by new writers (such as the pros and cons of using a subdirectory or a subdomain, which I plan on tackling next), I had to resort to publications that were all — not surprisingly — behind paywalls too.
Again, I was fine with this because I was planning to sign up for a membership anyway. But it just added another layer of frustration to my onboarding experience. I had to pay — not just so I can get the answers to some common questions that should be housed in Medium’s Help section for free — but in order to satisfy the “internal signals” that Medium requires before it’ll even recognize my writing as real and worthy enough to show others.
So I started keeping tabs on my writing output and engagement metrics. Within eight days of signing up for Medium and publishing my first article, I had:
- Published 3 more articles, for a total of 4
- Clapped and commented on 10+ articles
- Followed 8 people
Still … crickets. Nothing happened. I kept searching for my name or my articles, but nothing came up.
It was demoralizing.
On the 11th day, I finally got fed up and submitted a help ticket. I asked how long it takes Medium to index new writers. Was there more I needed to do?
How I Got Indexed
Two days later, I received this response:
“I have requested Google re-indexing of any involved Medium pages. It may take a few days for Medium and all search engines to re-crawl and re-index the page(s), and update their results. If you don’t see any improvements after a week, please let me know.”
HURRAY! Finally, a solution!
Indeed, after an hour, I searched for “Shang-Chi storytelling” again — and there it was! Like magic! My article finally EXISTS! It showed up in a Google search too.
This was my first time seeing something I’ve written show up in a search result, so it was an immense milestone for me in my fledgling Medium career. 😃
This made me wonder: since Medium was so swift to “re-index” my articles, it clearly means that I’d passed their internal threshold for being indexed … right?
So if you’re a new writer whose articles are not searchable yet within Medium, and you’ve engaged with the Medium community like I have — then I would encourage you to submit a help ticket too. Maybe it does take about two weeks to get indexed, or maybe it can be done earlier.
If anyone had a different experience, or can offer any further insight into how new writers can get indexed faster, please share with us in the comments!
Dancy Fu is a writer and learning experience designer. She has been analyzing movies, TV shows, novels and screenplays for more than 16 years, collecting storytelling insights to improve her writing and online courses. Want the most fun way to learn storytelling? Join my email list!
