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
-
Subdomain or subfolder?
Hello, We are working on a new site. The idea of the site is to have an ecommerce shop, but the homepage will be a content page, basically a blog page.
Technical SEO | | pinder325
My developer wants to have the blog (home) page on a subdomain, so blog.example.com, because it will be easier to make a nice content page this way, and the the rest of the site will just be on the root domain (example.com). I'm just worried that this will be bad for our SEO efforts. I've always thought it was better to use a sub folder rather than a subdomain. If we get links to the content on the subdomain, will the link juice flow to the shop, on the root domain? What are your thoughts?0 -
Hosting images externally
In these days of CDNs does it matter for SEO whether images (and PDFs etc.) are hosted off-site? Does it make a difference if images hosted on Flickr, photobucket etc. Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
SEO impact of the anatomy of URL subdirectory structure?
I've been pushing hard to get our Americas site (DA 34) integrated with our higher domain authority (DA 51) international website. Currently our international website is setup in the following format... website.com/us-en/ website.com/fr-fr/ etc... The problem that I am facing is that I need my development framework installed in it's own directory. It cannot be at the root of the website (website.com) since that is where the other websites (us-en, fr-fr, etc.) are being generated from. Though we will have control of /us-en/ after the integration I cannot use that as the website main directory since the americas website is going to be designed for scalability (eventually adopting all regions and languages) so it cannot be region specific. What we're looking at is website.com/[base]/us-en. I'm afraid that if base has any length to it in terms of characters it is going to dilute the SEO value of whatever comes after it in the URL (website.com/[base]/us-en/store/product-name.html). Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
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 -
Does a subdomain benefit from being on a high authority domain?
I think the title sums up the question, but does a new subdomain get any ranking benefits from being on a pre-existing high authority domain. Or does the new subdomain have to fend for itself in the SERPs?
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
How Does Dynamic Content for a Specific URL Impact SEO?
Example URL: http://www.sja.ca/English/Community-Services/Pages/Therapy Dog Services/default.aspx The above page is generated dynamically depending on what province the visitor visits from. For example, a visitor from BC would see something quite different than a visitor from Nova Scotia; the intent is that the information shown should be relevant to the user of that province. How does this effect SEO? How (or from what location) does Googlebot decide to crawl the page? I have considered a subdirectory for each province, though that comes with its challenges as well. One such challenge is duplicate content when different provinces may have the same information for some pages. Any suggestions for this?
Technical SEO | | ey_sja0 -
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 -
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