Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
# Tag - opacity and SEO impact
Hello,
Technical SEO | | Tiffany_Barn
I have a query animation 'fade-in-up' on my website: tiffanybarnard.com which moves the H1 tag slightly and fades it in from zero opacity to 1. Will this affect the SEO value of the H1 tag?
Thank you!0 -
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog.
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This was done with the purpose of gaining backlinks to our main website as well along with to our blog. This set us very low in organic traffic and not to mention, lost the backlinks. For anything, they are being redirected to 301 code. Kindly suggest changes to bring back all the traffic.
Technical SEO | | arun.negi0 -
Robots.txt on subdomains
Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
Technical SEO | | Whittie0 -
Reverse proxy a successful blog from subdomain to subfolder?
I have an ecommerce site that we'll call confusedseo.com. I created a WordPress blog and CNAME'd it to blog.confusedseo.com. Since then, the blog has earned a PageRank of 3 and a decent amount of organic traffic. I am considering a reverse proxy to forward blog.confusedseo.com to confusedseo.com/blog/. As I understand it, this will greatly help the "link juice" of the root domain. However, I'm concerned about any potential harm done to the existing SEO value of the blog. What, if anything, should I be doing to ensure that the reverse proxy doesn't hurt my "juice" rather than help it?
Technical SEO | | bedbugsupply0 -
Does an subdomain hosted offsite provide SEO value
We have a job board hosted through an applicant processing system which we've setup as a subdomain (jobs.ourcompany.com), most of the assets are hosted on our primary domain (ourcompany.com). My question is does having it hosted offsite provide any value? Do we get credit for that content being shared and distributed on the web or does the applicant processing system? As I see it the options are (correct me if I'm wrong): Host the job listings on our primary domain (ourcompany.com/jobs) and have it point to the application on the subdomain. Advertise the job listings pointing to the primary domain on the paid sites. The free job listing sites will automatically point to the sub-domain because the applicant processing system automatically submits them. Host the job listings entirely on the sub-domain applicant tracking system and link to it from our primary site navigation. Advertise the job listings to the sub-domain so that both free and paid point to the same place. Obviously the second one would be much easier just not sure on the technical side of our website getting credit by search engines as the one who has produced the content.
Technical SEO | | r1200gsa0 -
Keep the blog separate or incorporate into main domain?
So my organization currently has both a main site and on a separate domain and separate host a wordpress blog. (our own domain not a wordpress.com) the content posted on this blog is local, community driven, and related to our business but it is not used in anyway as a "sales" tool. It's more for interaction purposes with members and employees. This blog has a lot of content and is updated with new posts very often. (generate traffic from a pretty wide variety of searches some related some not) My plan has been to 301 the old domain and move the wordpress blog over to our root domain in a subdirectory such as oursite.com/blog. Does anyone have tips for moving a blog over like this? I'm concerned about any link juice it has dropping off and since it does provide some links to our root site currently (since it's basically a separate site). Basically i'm wondering if it'll be worth the effort or if i should just keep it separate and focus on other content gen strategies.
Technical SEO | | SCFederal0 -
How much impact does bad html coding really have on SEO?
My client has a site that we are trying to optimise. However the code is really pretty bad. There are 205 errors showing when W3C validating. The >title>, , <keywords> tags are appearing twice. There is truly excessive javascript. And everything has been put in tables.</keywords> How much do you think this is really impacting the opportunity to rank? There has been quite a bit of discussion recently along the lines of is on-page SEO impacting anymore. I just want to be sure before I recommend a whole heap of code changes that could cost her a lot - especially if the impact/return could be miniscule. Should it all be cleaned up? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Chammy0 -
What's the SEO impact of url suffixes?
Is there an advantage/disadvantage to adding an .html suffix to urls in a CMS like WordPress. Plugins exist to do it, but it seems better for the user to leave it off. What do search engines prefer?
Technical SEO | | Cornucopia0