Medium will no longer import any of our articles

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.

I just got Medium to import my blog by adding the below code to the inside tag on my CMS Template Page.

Maybe Medium is confused as to your title too.

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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).

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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!

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Hi @michelle_hansen, can you post the code change you made? Not sure if I follow exactly. Would love to have it working.

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.

More information on this can be found here:

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Thank you @JonUK! That looks like it universally fixes the problem.

@michelle_hansen, you absolutely pointed me in the right direction with og:title. I should have tried to add all of the core OpenGraph properties.

@JonUK & @michelle_hansen - can’t thank both of you enough. Really happy to have this sorted.

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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.

@jmw sorry for the misunderstanding thank you

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No worries! Given that you misinterpreted, figured it was important to clarify for all :slight_smile:

Have you got the URL for the page you’re having trouble with? Can have a quick look and see if there are any other obvious issues with the page.

This is the blog post however I realized that I was posting in the wrong place anyways given that we don’t use the Webflow CMS :joy:.

Looking at the source code of your blog post, there’s no actual content in the page / normal server-side rendered content.

Your blog post appears to be using client-side JavaScript and the content is in the JavaScript file: https://cdn.roadgoat.com/assets/application-2197b5d57b3c832808817141800848a363602a827726957315751a8bf69d49d5.js

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.

Yes, that’s correct but I also fed it our pre-rendered version (https://www.roadgoat.com/blog/how-to-beautifully-visualize-your-foursquare-activity-on-roadgoat?_escaped_fragment_=) and it also didn’t accept it. The weird thing is import was working fine for us a few months ago

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.)

Hey @DavidAdkin!

Glad you were able to figure out how to add a rel=canonical to your Webflow posts! And great questions. Here’s my answers:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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Thanks for the quick response @jmw!

  1. 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…

  2. Yea I’d be happy to send you one. Here’s the latest blog post that didn’t work: Please Don’t Make These 3 Mistakes When Naming your Startup. | Adalo Blog And no I don’t think we have anything in our posts Collection that would break up the rich text. In fact, it used to work with this same format back in February when imported this article: What Features Should You Launch With? (Demystifying the MVP) | Adalo Blog

Looking forward to your response!

Hey, @jmw any update here?? (Sorry not trying to be too pushy here but importing articles to Medium a large part of our SEO strategy.)

Cheers,
David

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”.

36%20PM

This was marked as the solution for this thread from @JonUK on May 23