About SEO and Medium

The heart of Medium’s mission is to deepen understanding, and we believe the best way to accomplish that mission is to be an open platform -- a place where anyone can have a voice, regardless of background, affiliation, or expertise. 

To protect that mission, it is imperative that we have systems in place to support the success of creators who are here to share ideas and connect with readers, and discourage creators who are solely leveraging Medium for search engine optimization (in plainer words: spam and self-serving clickbait). 

Medium limits content that is made available to third-party search engines, as well as Medium’s native search and topic pages. The overwhelming majority of content that Medium will no longer be allowing to be indexed is what most people would consider spam, and the net effect will be more traffic to quality content long-term.

This system, similar to Google’s Page Rank, is based on a number of internal signals that help us determine if your use of Medium is above board. It may take a little bit of time for you as a creator to become a trusted part of the Medium network and meet the threshold for being indexed, but if your stories meet our basic quality threshold, they will end up in external and native search indexes. We encourage you to continue publishing your best writing on Medium, engaging with other users by clapping, following, and responding, and becoming a part of the Medium community.

This will greatly benefit the SEO for Medium creators who are publishing stories that align with our mission. Medium will be sharing less of the content that we don’t want on Medium with Google, so Medium’s Google Page Rank will continuously improve as click-through rates from search queries increase, and this will result in legitimate Medium creators ranking higher across all Google searches. This will lead to even more discovery of the stories and ideas that you publish on Medium.

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