Purpose of using canonical links on Medium articles
A canonical link aims to signal to search engines that this content has been published on multiple sites, and this particular one is the main link. Adding canonical links to your articles will stop crawling your content by search engines.
Why does using canonical links matter to you?
It matters because you can use the traffic that your article generates for your business goals. These goals may vary based on your content marketing strategy. For example, one use case could be to introduce your newsletters to a new audience, obtain their email address, and convert them to be your potential customers.
As writers of this platform, we are fortunate as Medium allows us to create this vital signal when submitting our stories. Other platforms that I write for do not have this feature. Medium is ahead of the game and shows support to its creators. We should be grateful for this opportunity.
Here is Medium’s official position on canonical links:
“When posting content to multiple platforms at the same time (such as your website and Medium), it’s important to make sure a single source of that content is the ultimate authority. Medium’s official tools for cross-posting add the source it is importing from as the canonical link automatically, but you can also add your canonical link manually to your post. Search engines use canonical links to determine and prioritize the ultimate source of content, removing confusion when there are multiple copies of the same document in different locations. Sites that publish an overabundance of duplicate content without indicating a canonical link may be penalized in search engine rankings”. Source
You can read the article published on Medium’s ILLUMINATION Publication by Dr Mehmet Yildiz (Chief Editor of ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications).
Actually, Medium Favors You: Why do you need canonical links for your articles published on Medium?
About The Author
I am a technologist, published author, editor, blogger, digital marketing strategist, and content developer with four decades of industry experience.
I write articles for Medium, News Break, and Vocal Media. On Medium, I established ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR, ILLUMINATION Book Chapter, Technology Hits, and SYNERGY publications supporting 10,000+ writers and serving 137,000+ readers on Medium.
You can Join my publications requesting access here.
Dr Mehmet Yildiz 