Impact of Medium blog hosted on my subdomain
-
I am using the Medium blogging platform to blog, but it is pointed to my site and appears at blog.mysite.com.
Since the content is hosted on Medium and pointed to my subdomain via an A Record / CNAME / etc...
1. Will my domain get credit for backlinks to the blog content?
2. If Medium changes in the future and no longer points to my subdomain, will I lose all of the backlinks I've built up?
-
Thanks John,
The right decision is clear to me now.
-Dave
-
David,
Everything John just said in Point 2 is exactly what was running through my mind as I read your question. As the person responsible for the SEO strength of your website, you should have full control over as much of your SEO activity as possible. If your blogging platform is concerning as described, you really need to reevaluate whether that's the best thing for your site.
-
David -
Thanks for your question, and it's one I see often. I would say this is a much bigger question than "subdomain v subfolder", but really the ability to affect your own SEO.
In direct answer to your questions:
- Since it's on your subdomain, yes. Make sure you have that subdomain verified in Search Console and sitemaps submitted, parameters controlled, etc as well. Also link between your main domain and your subdomain to pass link equity back and forth.
- If they change in the future and no longer point to your subdomain with no way for you to reclaim your content and republish it on a blog you host yourself, then yes. However, I don't really see this happening anytime soon.
Point 2 brings up the bigger question of if you should host your blog on Medium. While it is indeed a beautiful platform and writing on it is a joy (I actually do a lot of blog drafting in their editor), you don't have control over a lot of things such as:
- Internal linking within sidebars/top navs to other important places on your own website
- Full branding. I do recognize that you can add a top banner and branding at the top of blogs hosted on Medium, but it still overall looks like a Medium blog (their typeface, their styles, etc) not like your own brand
If you are concerned about the SEO implications (as you seem to be and should be), I'd definitely recommend investigating a self-hosted blog platform like WordPress instead of Medium.
Good luck!
-
1. Yes your domain gets credit for the backlinks.
2. If they change in the future and just have everything on Medium and not your subdomain you would lose the backlinks. I don't see that happening though.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Bulk redirection of blogs
Hi all, we're going to changing the url structure of our website. Moving from: /news-and-views/blog/thisistheblogpost to /blog/thisistheblogpost (ie removing the /news-and-views/ portion of the url). There's approximately 300 posts. I have 2 questions - will this have an impact on domain wide authority? and is bulk 301 redirects the best solution? The blogs themselves don't get a huge amount of traffic but we just want to make sure we don't do something that will be penalized by search engines.
Technical SEO | | francisclark2 -
Pros and Cons of using rel=next on blog posts
Hi there, at the bottom of my website's blog posts the rel=prev and rel=next tags are used on links that point to the previous article that was posted and the next article that was posted. Often these articles are not 'linked' in terms of their content or message. Is this the correct use of rel=next/prev and if not what are the possible negative effects. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Bee1590 -
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Internal Wordpress blog ranked and not the main page
hello www.mysite.com/blog is ranked higher than www,mysite.com. i am trying to find the reason for the blog to rank higher which is not my goal. the blog reached the second page and the main domain is no where to be found. is there anything on Wordpress setup that may cause this? thanks
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
User Created Subdomain Help
Have I searched FAQ: Yes My issue is unique because of the way our website works and I hope that someone can provide some guidance on this.Our website http://breezi.com is a website builder where users can build their own website. When users build their site it creates a sub-domain route to their created site, for example: http://mike.breezi.com. Now that I have explained how our site works here is the problem: Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools are indexing ALL the user created websites under our TLD and thus it is our impression that any content created in those sub-domains can confuse the search engine to thinking that the user created website and content is relevant to _OUR _main sitehttp://breezi.com. So, what we would like to know if there is a way to let search engines know that the user created sites and content is not related to our TLD site. Thanks for any help and advise.
Technical SEO | | breezi0 -
Robots.txt for subdomain
Hi there Mozzers! I have a subdomain with duplicate content and I'd like to remove these pages from the mighty Google index. The problem is: the website is build in Drupal and this subdomain does not have it's own robots.txt. So I want to ask you how to disallow and noindex this subdomain. Is it possible to add this to the root robots.txt: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Partouter
Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /subdomain.root.nl/ Thank you in advance! Partouter0 -
Microsite on subdomain vs. subdirectory
Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites. The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc. Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances. What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site? I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
Fastest Hosting Company
Who has the fastest hosting company? what major provider has fastest service for page load times? Looking for affordability like godaddy.
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110
