undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdanso10y ago0 comments

To hijack your tongue-in-cheek comment...I genuinely would appreciate it if someone, at some point, looked at analytics before and after syndicating to Medium to not just compare number of visitors between the original blog and Medium, but whether PageRank for the original blog dropped due to duplication penalties applied by Google's algorithm.

0 comments

minimaxir10y ago

It's worth nothing that Medium described this syndication workflow as an expected use case during the announcement.

I don't think they would have done that if there was a knowing SEO downside. It would hurt everyone.

dansoOP10y ago

I want to take them at their word...but it's more up to Google, isn't it? And doesn't Google still rely (in part) on the canonical meta tag to resolve duplicates? Currently, the posted Medium post has this:

      <link rel="canonical" href="https://medium.com/engineering-at-ifttt/data-infrastructure-at-ifttt-35414841f9b5">

It would be relatively easy for Medium to appropriately set that tag -- I mean, if "original URL" is captured somewhere in the API, or in the Medium post-create-admin interface (I don't know, I haven't logged into my own Medium for awhile)...that would explicitly resolve the ambiguity, though at an obvious cost to their own SEO.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse