Before You Use Substack Articles As WordPress Blog Posts, Read This...
I stopped syndicating on Ragged Riches for a reason!
As many folks know, I launched a personal finance for content creators site named Ragged Riches. It’s not a Substack publication, though I am starting to wonder whether I should migrate it.
If you’re like me and you are doing an independent website for one reason or another, your biggest hurdle is driving traffic to your site. This means that you might be dealing with advertising and SEO woes.
After all, it’s not like WordPress has a community around it like Substack or an algorithm that puts work to the forefront like Medium. (Erm, technically it does have an algorithm, but it’s notoriously weak and almost no one gets traffic from it. But I digress.)
I’ve occasionally reposted some of my business writing on Ragged Riches in hopes of boosting SEO juice.
More often than not, this seems like it’s a good idea, but I found out it actually can harm your SEO rankings. It seemed like a good idea, but there was a major snag that actually dinged my ratings.
So what was going on?
Let’s talk about it.
Search engines only want to categorize ONE link for the same story.
As many of my readers know, I have a tendency of syndicating my Substack on Medium and vice-versa. This is a way that I expand the amount of viewers who see my content. However, it’s also a bad, bad move if you’re looking to please the Google algorithm.
If you syndicate, you might be making your published stories cancel one another out. This makes it harder for you to get that SEO juice that you need to make your stories easy to discover. On SEO engines, it’s seen as “duplicate content,” even if you change the titles up a bit.
Here’s how to bypass that, if you are writing on Medium or elsewhere.
Have a “canonical” link that is designate the original.
Wordpress
In WordPress, you can use the Yoast Plugin to change the canonical link—just like in this walkthrough here.
Medium
In Medium, you can change the canonical link on the backend, using these instructions I snagged from the Medium site below.
Substack
Substack doesn’t have canonical SEO abilities yet, so they often have to be treated as the OG. So, yeah, that is a thing.
Happy writing