Using Medium to Source Traffic: Is this Black Hat?

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   eugbugposted 2 years ago

   The canonical link thing isn't working on one of my Medium articles (which is a duplicate of a Feltmagnet guide) It appears at the top of SERPS and the Feltmagnet version has been eliminated from search results. So I cleared the content in the Medium article, put up a detour sign and routed the traffic back to Feltmagnet. I'm wondering could I do this for more articles, remove the canonical links, use Medium's better rank performance and route traffic back here? Or would Google treat this as a black hat SEO technique?

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   PaulGoodman67posted 2 years ago

   Won't the Feltmagnet article just lose its ranking eventually? It's difficult to believe that deleting the content is going to work out for you.
   
   I'm not sure why you have all these issues.
   
   Could it be related to something you're doing when you copy articles over to Medium? I've heard you say that you copy and paste them, then presumably you add a canonical link via the advanced settings?
   
   In the past, I've used the import settings in Medium and that doesn't throw up the same issues with rankings for me. You need to edit and then wait two or three hours to get the date right, then do some basic editing, but those are the only complications I've experienced.
   
   That said, whether it's worth it is another matter. As you know from previous comments, I don't see much advantage with duplication of HP content at Medium. It's a great idea in theory, but I've gained very little in practice.

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      eugbugposted 2 years agoin reply to this

      Maybe. If the Medium guide doesn't fall in rankings, it would prove a point that Google just loves "celebrity" brand names and will rank guides, even if there's no content behind them. I add a canonical link via the advanced settings. Importing stories doesn't work very well because firstly images aren't imported and secondly and more importantly, even if I alter a Hubpages article and leave it for a period, the publish date on Medium can be a month to a year in the past.

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         PaulGoodman67posted 2 years agoin reply to this

         Re importing: the date thing is easily soluble, you just have to edit the original article and wait a couple of hours or so for it to update before importing in order to get the current date.
         
         Copying and pasting is much more laborious than importing, in my experience.
         
         It's your choice, of course, but if you're only earning a few dollars a month in total from all your Medium articles, and some of them are also damaging your HP earnings on top of that (which presumably earn more): one has to wonder what's the point of putting time and energy into the problem?
         
         I'll admit that I tend to be earnings focused, and this may sound hard-headed, but I would just delete the problem Medium articles with an aim to get my HP rankings and earnings back?
         
         It goes without saying that part of the purpose of the canonical link, as I understand it, is so that Google knows which is the original article. Something is going very wrong for you if Google sees the HP article as a later duplicate.

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            eugbugposted 2 years agoin reply to this

            As far as I recall, I have left articles for a day and the dates still ended up being from months or a year ago. Usually I just copy and paste an entire article and that brings in both text and images and the captions just have to be moved back into place. This also preserves the sub headings. Articles that were duplicated aren't getting any external traffic anymore, apart from the one that the canonical link doesn't work on, so I don't know whether that means the ranking of Hubpages guides is being damaged.
            Is there anyway of temporarily unpublishing Medium stories without deleting them?

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               PaulGoodman67posted 2 years agoin reply to this

               If both the import function and canonical links aren't working, you seem pretty much screwed. I've not experienced the problems you describe and I've got maybe forty-something duplicates.
               
               There's not a way of temporarily unpublishing that I know of. You can remove from a publication, but that's a different thing. The "published elsewhere" button should always be checked, of course.
               
               It's not worth worrying about, if you're not really earning much from them. Even lucrative articles fade quite quickly on Medium, in my experience.
               
               If they don't do well initially, it's rare for them to soar later, especially since Medium changed the algo. Protecting the original HP articles should be a priority, if they earn, in my opinion.
               
               The duplicating strategy doesn't generally work, in my experience. I've tried to find overlap between HP and Medium, but no success. Maybe if it's a very techno article on an aspect of a programming language, that might work, I don't know.
               
               Generally speaking, I think that only a limited number of types of article work on Medium, the scope is nowhere near as broad as HP. That's why you see hubbers adjusting their strategies: e.g. OldRoses writing about politics, Bev writing about relationships, etc.

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   eugbugposted 2 years ago

   There only seems to be a canonical link issue with one article so something has gone awry on the Medium or Google end. I tried editing an updating the link, but it won't let me save the new one copied from Feltmagnet, because it's already correct.

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   eugbugposted 2 years ago

   I just came across this on developers.google.com:
   
   "A Google Search result usually points to the canonical page, unless one of the duplicates is explicitly better suited for a user. For example, the search result will probably point to the mobile page if the user is on a mobile device, even if the desktop page is marked as canonical."
   
   https://developers.google.com/search/do … icate-urls

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