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I'm moving my company's blog out of Medium to a subdirectory of our domain name.

We have three blogs, one on a subdomain (when Medium still allowed it) and two as regular Medium organization blogs.

To my knowledge, Medium doesn't let you set redirects or edit canonical URLs after a blog has been published which means that there is no technical way to indicate to search engines that the content moved.

My plan is currently to migrate the content to our new blog but set canonical URLs that point back to their original Medium URL so as to not have an empty blog, duplicate content or lose backlinks to our original blog.

I've thought about it for a while but just wanted to make sure that this is my best option since this will mean that our new blog wouldn't rank on old content.

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    If you set canonical URLs pointing to the old Medium URLs, you'll have to keep the Medium content live, and you'll basically be telling Google "This is just a copy of the old one." It does prevent duplicate content, but you'll get no credit for it SEO-wise. You may want to see whether you can use a meta-refresh or anything like that on Medium so you could manually, one by one, forward each URL to the new counterpart on the new blog. That's about the only way you can get the benefit of the old content on your new site.
    – WebElaine
    Apr 16, 2019 at 21:20
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    Yup I checked and since you can't embed any HTML (it's a rich text editor), you can't use any of the "sneaky redirect" methods like meta refresh, JavaScripts redirects and the likes. The only other idea I had was shortening the old articles to be only a summary and post the full article on the new blog but I'm not 100% sure if Google would recognize this as fresh content rather than a duplicate?
    – user99878
    Apr 16, 2019 at 23:51

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With those limitations, in order to ensure the new site doesn't get any duplicate content dings or Google suspecting that it isn't the real author of the old posts, I personally would choose to leave all the old content on the old site.

When I built the new site, I'd have an about page that specifically references the old content and links back to it, and perhaps have noindex tags on everything until I had 5-10 posts so it wouldn't just be one tiny blog post.

Then, I would also go back through the Medium posts and add a reference at the top and bottom of each that says something to the effect of, we've moved! You can still read the old articles here but make sure to check out the new articles here (link to new). If you have time, also go through the old Medium posts one by one and add specific callouts to specific related posts on the new site. I know you said there is no HTML availability but if you can add callouts like blockquotes or some other styling to call attention to these little blurbs - like "Hey, this is a popular old post, but did you know we have a whole new site? You might like (article 1) and (article 2) over there."

It's not an ideal user experience, but seems to be preferable from an SEO standpoint versus anything you could do to either remove the Medium blog entirely or shorten those posts and try to gain credit for them on a different URL with no way to confirm via redirects.

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  • While you're at it, you may also want to consider how you are going to set up your analytics. You could choose to set up cross-domain tracking and see all the Medium analytics with the new URL analytics, or you could have two totally separate accounts and then when they bounce from site to site they would start a new analytics session each time. It depends on how much you think people will hop back and forth - if not many, then it's no problem keeping them separate and it's a lot easier to set up separate.
    – WebElaine
    Apr 17, 2019 at 13:11

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