Odd question and not sure where to post it because I don’t think it is a Webflow issue.
Our client publishes syndicated content from a Webflow based magazine we designed: magazine They republish that content on Medium through Medium’s “Import a Story” (which generates the correct canonical attribution). All imports from our Webflow site fail or are blocked. It worked perfectly up until about a month ago for about 40 articles and now is blocked (or fails).
I am able to import stories from other domain sources to Medium without a hitch, it is only fails on our site content. I ran a test to see if content from Webflow’s blog would import to Medium and it works fine, so it is not a global Webflow content issue or incompatibility.
I am awesomely good at breaking things!
I am stabbing in the dark. If anyone has a thought on something I could try please let me know.
I am pursuing the issue from Mediums technical support as well.
Robert,
Thanks for posting this. I encountered the same problem today for my own Webflow hosted blog, which worked fine a month or two ago, but failed today
I tried importing a story from my client’s Webflow blog and it didn’t work either. I reached out to Medium. Getting their reply (below) I reached out to Webflow. Still waiting on that. This is what Medium said:
Hi Michelle,
I’m sorry to hear this is happening.
Medium uses a third-party service to handle the technical side of importing a single story to Medium. We send a request to their API with the URL to be imported, and they return the contents of the URL to the best of their ability.
It looks like the import tool was unable to import your story. Sadly, in this case, you’d need to copy and paste the content into the Medium editor manually.
Hi @michelle_hansen. Thanks for sharing your experience and Medium’s reply. I received nearly an exact clone of your letter this morning from chatbot Jonas
Hi there,
I’m sorry to hear this is happening.
Medium uses a third-party service to handle the technical side of importing a single story to Medium. We send a request to their API with the URL to be imported, and they return the contents of the URL to the best of their ability.
It looks like the import tool was unable to import your story. Sadly, in this case, you’d need to copy and paste the content into the Medium editor manually.
Sorry for the trouble!
Thanks,
Jonas
User Service
Here was my reply for refr:
Thanks for the quick reply Jonas.
My core issue is generating the canonical url.
How will I create a canonical link for the story if I cannot use "Import Story”?
“Import Story” fails completely - so no story is generated.
• I have tried stripping down the article to just a bare shell of info with very little luck, though I have had a couple succeed in creating a Medium story I could edit (a less than 5% success rate).
• An embedded video seems to always fail? Not absolutely certain, but we have had zero success with any that contain videos.
• Webflow’s blog seems to work fine even with a video in the article.
If you have any successes please post an update. I have a bunch to post on Medium and some are a month late at this point. Thanks again for the reply!
It is interesting to hear that it is happening with the Webflow API request. Guess we have to wait and see what our friends at Webflow have to say. My content is on hold for the moment.
Sorry you’re having this trouble! I just tried importing one of your articles and it seemed to work fairly well, if not entirely.
But I don’t think you need the Medium-added canonical URL, as long as you’ve added a canonical URL field to your own blog collection. (See item 7 in https://webflow.com/blog/seo-and-webflow-the-essential-guide if you haven’t.) Just add a link back to your original post at the bottom of the article (like medium does automatically on import).
Perfect John! I was under the assumption I needed to place an HTML canonical attribution on any duplicate. That will save us some work and a ton of frustration. I greatly appreciate the response!
And thank you so much for the Essential Guide - It has really lived up to it’s name!
I recently had an issue where Medium would no longer import my blog articles. The fix for me was to ensure the Open Graph protocol metadata og:type was added to my page.
Im also getting the issue with importing. @JonUK’s solution didn’t work for me unfortunately. I believe @jmw’s work around is not correct - as far as I’m reading, canonical must be in the header and Google disregards it if it is in the body
I wasn’t saying you’d place a rel=canonical link in the body of the post, simply a plain link back to your source article, to drive traffic back to the source. The important rel=canonical here is the one you place in your Webflow CMS collection.
I suspect that the Medium.com import tool expects your content to be in the markup of page and will not parse and execute JavaScript and then evaluate the DOM to obtain your content.
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