Here is a nice online forum thread on the do’s and don’ts of republishing your content on Medium and LinkedIn.

A long time back I had written a blog post on whether you should use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing and publishing your content.

As long as you stick to the basic tenets of content quality, I think on the web, when it comes to creating sources for inbound traffic, the more is the proverbial merrier.

Although there are pros and cons for using your own as well as external publishing platforms, every platform and content channel has its own advantages.

The biggest benefit of publishing on websites like Medium and LinkedIn is that they already have a ready-made audience. Even your first blog post over there can go viral. These websites already enjoy better search engine rankings.

With limited budget it is not possible to publish unique content on every major platform, including your own blog and website. This is why, sometimes you have to republish your content – what you have published on your own blog you also publish on Medium and LinkedIn. This is called content republishing.

But then what about the duplicate content penalty?

Google doesn’t like crawling, indexing and ranking the same content again and again. This is why, it’s algorithm frowns upon duplicate content.

So, if the same blog post exists on your own blog, on Medium and also on LinkedIn, it can end up annoying the Google algorithm.

As mentioned by Rand Fishkin in the above thread, even if Google doesn’t penalize you for publishing duplicate content, your traffic may get diluted because instead of ranking your link higher, Google may end up ranking the Medium or the LinkedIn link higher. All the traffic due to your high-quality content will be lapped up by these publishing platforms.

The benefit would be that may be your link never had a chance anyway, so your content wouldn’t have gotten so much attention if it hadn’t been published on Medium and LinkedIn. A valid point.

What would you prefer? 3000 views on Medium or 30 views on your own blog? Decide on your own.

These days I am republishing my content on Medium. How do I do it? Why do I do it?

How do I do it without running the risk of getting into the “duplicate content” penalty?

I use the canonical tag in the original blog post.

Insert image of the canonical link

When you use the canonical tag within your web page or blog post you tell Google that the link containing this canonical tag is the original link, the original source of the content and wherever else the same content appears, it shouldn’t be considered for search engine rankings.

It’s a good practice that whenever you republish, in the end, link to the original content and specify it that the original content exists somewhere else.

These days I am republishing some of my blog posts on Medium for the reason mentioned above. The exposure that I may get on Medium can be exponential.

I don’t hope to get business from Medium although, it cannot be totally ruled out. My main attraction is the newsletter signup form that I include with every post. If one of my posts begins to get lots of traffic many visitors are bound to subscribe to my email updates. This is what I’m targeting for by republishing my content on Medium.