Canonical URLs on Medium - Technical SEO Playbook

Easy Recommended

Default Canonicals

How Medium handles canonical by default.

1

Self-Referencing Canonical

1

Every Medium story has a canonical pointing to itself.

2

Format: <link rel="canonical" href="https://medium.com/..." />

3

This is standard behavior—no duplicate content issues within Medium.

Intermediate Recommended

Import with Original Canonical

Republish content while preserving SEO credit.

1

Import a Story

1

Click your profile > Stories > Import a story.

2

Paste the URL of your original article (from your blog).

3

Medium will scrape and create a draft.

4

Crucially: The canonical tag will point to your original URL.

2

Why Use Import

1

Cross-post from your blog to Medium for wider reach.

2

Original blog gets the SEO credit (canonical protection).

3

Medium version can still get reads but won't compete in SERPs.

4

Best of both worlds: Blog SEO + Medium audience.

3

Verify Canonical

1

After publishing imported story, view source.

2

Search for rel="canonical".

3

Should point to your original blog URL, not Medium.

Intermediate

Custom Domain Canonicals

How canonicals work with custom domains.

1

Publication Custom Domain

1

If your publication uses a custom domain (yourblog.com)...

2

Canonical points to custom domain URL.

3

Example: https://yourblog.com/story-slug-abc123

4

This is better for brand SEO than medium.com URLs.

Canonical URLs

Prerequisites