We are sticking with Medium
Lately we have been thinking a lot about moving our blog to our domain, because we had the suspicion that the authority we were building in this blog is being transferred to medium rather than increasing the ranking of our website on Google.
Being a software engineer for more than a decade and having a bit of understanding about how Google ranks Pages, it is not an unreasonable estimate that the more content that you have on your own domain, it definitely adds to the credibility and the authority of the domain for those specific keywords that you’re writing about.
That’s why a lot of blogs could be found on the subdomain of the company, rather than on a common platform. I also came across a few articles where companies have moved their blog away from Medium into their own subdomain citing similar reasons.
Google give the credit for a piece of content to the domain that hosts it. If this is true, then every article on Medium adds credibility to Medium as a whole, rather than to individual publications. This is a SEO disaster for blog owners
Historically if you have seen blogging platforms including blogger.com by Google, every single blog was hosted on a subdomain.
For example, if you are the owner of a blog called Talking Cats, then the blog will be hosted on talkingcats.blogger.com. This made a ton of sense because from the point of view of Google every single subdomain is considered as a different site and the reputation of the content stayed with the blog.
But if you look at medium it is quite different, because every single publication is being hosted on medium itself, if you create Talking Cats on medium, then your blogs URL will be www.medium.com/talkingcats which from the point of view of Google is just another page that belongs to the medium.com.
This is precisely the reason why there had been a big confusion among pro-bloggers as to host their content on medium or to deploy their own blogging site.
But today I would like to argue that, if Google is to do it’s jobs right, by this time it would have definitely updated it’s algorithm to account for the fact that every single publication on medium is being hosted on the same domain rather than sub-domains and should have definitely optimised the engine to consider this fact while ranking publications and in turn treat individual publications in the same light as hosted on different subdomains.
If that is the case then hosting your blog on medium is exactly the same as hosting your blog on blog.talkingcats.com
I don’t have an authoritative answer as to if Google is doing, what I have argued for here, but I believe that this has either happened or it will happen soon and so I have put the idea of moving the blog away from medium to rest.
Another compelling reason to stick to medium is that, before YouTube came along everyone hosted their videos on their own domains, precisely to pease Google and to boost SEO. But today we all know that YouTube has become the go-to place for watching videos, such that even big companies post their videos on YouTube rather than hosting it on their own.
The exact same phenomenon is actually happening for the blogosphere as well, what YouTube did for videos, medium.com is doing it for blogs. So even if companies move away from medium today, it is only inevitable that they had to come back and move their blog back to this platform.
The rate at which Medium is growing is phenomenal. It has made blogging so easy and enjoyable, so it’s not going away anytime soon whether you like it or not
Remember, medium is not just pleasing the writers, it is also appealing to the readers. So it’s a fundamental shift compared to traditional blogging platforms. Whether it’s adding to the SEO of your website, only time will tell.
