Hey @jmw! I was able to figure out how to add the rel=canonical link our webflow CMS posts (using your instructions so thanks) but don’t you also have to add that to the Medium post? And I’m not sure you can do that without using Medium’s import tool?
(Also not being able to use Medium’s import tool is terrifying to me. I don’t want to mess up the SEO on our site. Do you know if Webflow is working on a fix for this? I would advocate for moving this up the priority list for your dev team. Looks like it’s been broken since May.)
Glad you were able to figure out how to add a rel=canonical to your Webflow posts! And great questions. Here’s my answers:
Yes, in an ideal world, you’d want the rel=canonical code in your Medium post too. And there’s likely not a way to add it without using Medium’s import tool. So that’s a pain. With that in mind, I’d recommend that you always wait for at least a few days before syndicating your posts to Medium. That’ll give Google time to recognize that the article published on your site is the original version, and prioritize it over the Medium version in SERPs. Making sure that you share the original version in your social media will help that as well. (It’s also worth noting that we’re far from the only people who syndicate content to Medium, so I’d imagine Google is very familiar with this wrinkle in people’s publishing habits.) I should also note at this point that I was wrong when I said earlier that just adding your link back to the source without rel=canonical would “work” — though hopefully it’d help drive traffic back to your site, at the least.
I just tried importing one of my posts on the Webflow blog to my Medium account, and it worked … mostly. Where it failed is pretty easy to understand: Our blog’s rich text content is split into two fields to allow for an “inline ad” in the middle of each post. Medium’s importer appears to fail when it hits that ad block, but imports the rest of the article without a hitch. To my mind this suggests the problem isn’t really with Webflow per se, and more likely arises from our content itself. With that in mind: do you have anything in your post Collection that might break up or otherwise interfere with the rich text block, @DavidAdkin? Happy to take a look if you can provide me a link.
Yea, driving traffic back to our main webflow site is awesome but nervous about the duplicate content from Medium affecting our overall SEO. I’m sure you’re right about how google probably understands Medium but if we can get the import to work that would be super ideal. Which leads me to point number…
I think you need to designate an Open Graph: type. This is the same issue I was having. It ultimately solved it for me. In my case the og type I chose was “article”.
This was marked as the solution for this thread from @JonUK on May 23
