
Don't Post Evergreen Content on Medium - tkrunning
https://bts.nomadgate.com/medium-evergreen-content
======
DamnInteresting
The author's primary complaint seems to be that Medium does not update the
pubdate when articles are updated, consequently Google and other search
engines give the article diminishing relevance over time. This strikes me as
more of a problem with search engines than with Medium.

In my experience, modern search engines give far too much relevance to date,
especially for evergreen content. I am purveyor of evergreen articles, and it
is sincerely quite obnoxious to put a lot of research and effort into an
original article, only to have some flip shop do a lazy rewrite a few months
later, citing my article as its primary source, yet ranking higher in search
because it is newer. It's a perverse incentive that encourages low-effort
regurgitators, and discourages original work. Grumble, grumble.

~~~
reaperducer
I don't fully disagree with you, but I think it depends on the domain.

You're right that it's annoying the way Google will show me results of a blog
post recently published by someone who just "discovered" something that's been
known for decades, and what Google shows me is a poor summary of more in-depth
original work done elsewhere.

But at the same time, I hate the way when I search for solutions to an issue
involving computers, I'll Google shows me nothing but results that are 10
years old, and no longer work because the operating system has changed.

~~~
lozaning
I wish I could put a limit on how old something could be before it's no longer
allowed to show up in my Google Now cards in android.

------
tkrunning
Medium has become the go-to publishing platform for more and more
entrepreneurs and businesses. However, I'd argue that most people would be
much better off publishing content on their own domain. This is especially
true for "evergreen" content, since Medium does not allow you to update the
date of your posts—meaning they will perform worse in search rankings after a
while.

I started my own business, Nomad Gate, on Medium about 3.5 years ago, but have
realized that I'm much better off hosting everything myself. After making the
switch, both my traffic and revenue more than doubled.

I wrote an article/PSA describing my experience with Medium (and moving off
it), how they are making it harder and harder to actually leave their platform
(no more custom domains, no more updating canonical links, etc), and how to
safely do content syndication to Medium after moving your content hub
elsewhere.

I hope it will help some of you make better decisions about your content
strategy, and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have for me!

~~~
tekkk
For anyone wanting to build their own blog and start publishing content, what
do you think is the best way to gain traffic? Just share it everywhere and
hope it grows or perhaps use a dual Medium+self-hosted thing? (for a time
being)

I'm in the process of doing that, and oh man the amount of minute details that
I have had to solve just to get things running. Granted, I did it the hard way
building everything from scratch with Gatsby but I guess it was sort of an
experiment too, so the time wasn't necessarily wasted. Recently I started
fiddling with the OG tags, JSON-LD etc, and that was a quite tedious task.
Hope it's all good now.

~~~
tkrunning
It obviously depend on your niche, but as long as it's not super competitive
I've had pretty good success appearing in the top 10 with articles posted on
my own (fairly new) domain.

Perhaps the best advice I can give is to don't focus too much on SE algorithms
(just make sure you don't mess up any tagging etc), but rather focus on
creating very good, well researched content. If you do that, people will
share, and Google will notice. Personally, I have had success with writing
long form articles. Many of the articles on Nomad Gate is 4-5000 words or
more. At that point you will get a lot of long tail traffic as well.

~~~
tnolet
This times 100. Had exactly the same experiences with some long form posts on
a new domain.

\- write good, original detailed stuff.

\- share on Twitter, Reddit,HN

\- reach out to people.

------
newscracker
As far as I'm concerned, posting any content of value on any platform or
service that you don't pay for and don't have a good control over is a bad
idea. It doesn't matter if it's Medium or Facebook or Instagram or Quora or
anything else. If it's, say, on one of the Facebook properties that puts up
barriers for people not registered with them (and thus the content is not
easily accessible on the open web), it's a terrible idea.

Those who value their content should (when financially feasible) ideally use
paid services or paid hosting where the provider's interests and the
publisher's interest are aligned.

~~~
laumars
> _As far as I 'm concerned, posting any content of value on any platform or
> service that you don't pay for and don't have a good control over is a bad
> idea. It doesn't matter if it's Medium or Facebook or Instagram or Quora or
> anything else._

Playing devils advocate for a moment: what about HN?

I get this place generally behaves differently but the points you discuss
doesn't explicitly exclude HN.

~~~
newscracker
There are many places that I didn’t mention. And I did forget HN, to be
honest. But you’re right — what I said applies to any long form and/or
thoughtful/useful content, even on HN.

~~~
laumars
I've seen similar discussions about Stack Overflow as well. At one time people
really welcomed comments being posted on there but some people have since
become a little jaded due to how strictly moderated that site is. While it
keeps the place in order, it does also mean anyone who might disagree with a
moderators decision - even when they have genuinely thoughtful content to post
- is left out from the community.

One day people might say something equivalent about HN. So your points are
valid about HN if just at a theoretical level.

~~~
mindgam3
It’s not just valid theoretically. There is a cognitive bias on HN in certain
hot button topics including psychiatry, addiction, and Facebook. Dissenting
opinions there run the risk of getting you trolled and flagged under dubious
pretenses.

Overall the moderation system here works better than any other I’ve seen on
the internet, but like any organization of humans there are some dysfunctional
areas where power prevails over logic.

------
joshwcomeau
> But to say that it's not possible for them is clearly a lie.

> Medium, if you ever read this: I don't appreciate being lied to.

> To top it off, they simply ignored the two (very polite) follow-up emails I
> sent them.

My guess is that Medium has an admin tool for customer-service agents to use,
and that tool was likely updated and no longer allows for canonical link
updating. As companies mature, the freedom of CS staff tends to diminish, as
mistakes are made or privileges are abused.

The email reads "there is no way for you (or us) to set it to something else".
I'm guessing "us" refers to the customer-service team, and not Medium as an
organization.

In other words, I don't believe the author was lied to.

As for not getting replies, I'm shocked to learn Medium even has an open
support email! I'd have to see the author's followups to know if they
warranted a reply, but given that the author adamantly believes that deception
is at play, it's possible that the emails aren't as polite as the author
believes.

~~~
jnbiche
Yes, this is what I thought probably happened, as well. The "us" referred to
the support agencies, and they likely were no longer able to change canonical
URLs (surprising they were allowed to do so to begin with).

~~~
tkrunning
Medium has quietly removed the support article describing this, but it used to
live here: [https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/227017408-Set-
cano...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/227017408-Set-canonical-
links)

Sadly, it's not archived anywhere I could find, but it did mention that you
could send them a CSV file of up to 50 URLs to update the canonical links for.

~~~
jnbiche
That doesn't contradict anything the agent said. I believe you that they could
previously set canonical links. But it's highly likely that upper management
changed that policy (I'm surprised they allowed it to begin with).

~~~
tkrunning
IMO, it's not too surprising that they tried to be a bit more writer friendly
initially (to attract more quality writers and larger publications). I guess
it no longer fit with their new business objectives, which is why they quietly
removed it this fall.

------
AndrewKemendo
I think most people on HN have set up their own domain and web services before
or have the ability to do so without having to do much learning. So I don't
think it's a stretch to say that on the scale of difficult things to do,
hosting your own blog is very low.

But Medium is just so easy. It's trivially easy. It's uncluttered, clean, easy
to just write an article and publish it or share for editing. The fonts are
easy to read anywhere, it's fast, easy to find through Google because of
@handles and works seamlessly on all devices. Oh and it's "free."

I've tried to figure out how to make self hosting this easy but honestly it
escapes me. Maybe someone smarter than me can figure that out.

~~~
owaty
It's not uncluttered. Do you really want someone arriving at your article to
be greeted with a big modal banner offering them to "make things official", as
well as the un-hidable top and bottom banners?

~~~
agentdrtran
People not on HN don't seem to care about these things.

~~~
Izkata
...complaints about Medium's obnoxious banner and general drop in UX quality
over the years are among the constants in the comments when they're posted
here...

~~~
oblio
> People not on HN

------
Mizza
I don't understand why anybody would ever post anything to Medium, as there is
a monthly article limit. If you want people to read your work, why would you
post to a site where how much the audience reads _other people_ affects their
access to yours? It makes no sense.

~~~
minimaxir
Medium became popular years ago because it allows authors to have an inbuilt
audience (via their recommended feed) and a writing interface that's
aesthetically pleasing.

In the years since, both advantages have weakened a bit as competitors now
have similar features.

The monthly article limit only applies to authors who opt into the Member
program to get revenue, which Medium has been pushing since previous
monetizations attempts failed.

------
tpaschalis
A previous HN discussion [0] on the same (rougly) subject, with many different
and good points for and against Medium (mostly against, though)..

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18440756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18440756)

------
tnolet
Where some here argue that Medium is the goto platform, I’d say it’s already
in decline. I’ve seen engagement rates plummet over the last year or so.

Side argument: complaining about services you use for free is kinda futile and
never sticks. I’m as guilty for that as the dude from the article.

------
peanutz454
On a side note. Google should allow users to ignore page's age as a ranking
criteria. I am not comfortable with the fact that some articles are lower in
search results simply because they were written long ago.

------
Sujan
FTFY: Posting any content on Medium is a terrible idea

------
traviswingo
What’s “evergreen content” ...?

~~~
brk
Generally anything that is not time sensitive, either because it is about a
generic or static topic, or because the author makes regular updates if it is
not static. EG: a post on WWII airplanes would be evergreen, as the data is
pretty much not going to change at this point. Similarly a regularly updated
post on stealth airplane technology could also be evergreen because it evolves
with the technology and is presumably always current and relevant.

A post on raising VC funding that was written in 2007 and not updated is not
really evergreeen because while it was accurate for the time, it is probably
not accurate and relevant in the current funding market.

~~~
platz
That's why you can also update the post on raising VC funding evergreen too by
updating the content so it is always relevant.

This logic can apply to a vast majority of content, with the exception of the
daily news.

------
somefive
Anyone figure out how he got medium to redirect?

Is see he uses an intermediary redirect (not sure why):

[https://medium.com/nomad-gate/estonian-e-residency-
ultimate-...](https://medium.com/nomad-gate/estonian-e-residency-ultimate-
guide-banking-taxes-cc27fe39c368)

->

[https://tkrunning.com/estonian-e-residency-ultimate-guide-
ba...](https://tkrunning.com/estonian-e-residency-ultimate-guide-banking-
taxes-cc27fe39c368)

->

[https://nomadgate.com/estonian-e-residency-
guide/](https://nomadgate.com/estonian-e-residency-guide/)

I'm guessing here but maybe medium allows redirect to tkrunning.com for some
reason, and it in turn allows redirects anywhere.

~~~
smitop
It seems like they moved the article to tkrunning.com, which is a Medium
custom domain created before Medium custom domains were disallowed. From
there, tkrunning.com is behind CloudFlare, so I would guess they used
CloudFlare's Page Rules, which lets you (among other things) setup 301
redirects at the CloudFlare reverse-proxy level.

~~~
tkrunning
Shhh... ;)

------
chiefalchemist
Let's not be naive. There's __always__ a trade-off, __always__ some
compromise. Why does the author sound so surprised?

We might not agree with all of Medium's decisions but we certainly have to
understand they have the right to make them. How many platforms have to jerk
the wheel left and then possibly jerk it right before we realize we're
hitchhikers. We don't own the vehicle. They do. We knew that when we got
onboard.

I'm not defending Medium. Not at all. That said, 2009 called and wants the
cries of "OMG! Look at what Platform X did ___ to me and my content..." back.

~~~
tkrunning
I'm not surprised and as I say in the article "A heads-up would have been
nice, but still, that's their prerogative."

I do understand why they would want to move in the direction they are, but I
also think authors in particular should be aware of the trends and make
choices that will benefit them, rather than Medium, in the long run.

What's a bit sneaky here is that they have been selling authors on the fact
that they own the content, and the fact that you can move it elsewhere later
(including updating canonical links). It's a bit like a SaaS offering an
export function, but after you put a lot of your data there they quietly
remove it. For bloggers, you can't claim to give them proper data portability
without a way of updating the canonical links.

------
blakesterz
I don't think I ever see any Medium content linked to anywhere else outside of
HN. Am I just missing some other sources? Is it a case of Medium writers link
to other Medium writers?

~~~
aaaaaaaaaab
You seem to be living behind a pretty good bullshit filter. Be grateful!

------
abhinavsharma
It's important to acknowledge that centralized platforms like Medium have
benefits, and a truly decentralized writing platform will only work if those
problems are worked out to a level where writers have a good experience.

\- The biggest thing they give a lot of writers is the promise of automated
distribution through their topic and user graphs.

\- They can ensure higher comment quality and real identity through review
systems that cost money but have economies of scale.

\- It seems like domain-wide features is still something Google uses so if
they keep the average content quality high, there's an SEO advantage to using
these platforms.

\- They can invest in a follow graph protocol that's non-anonymous (unlike
RSS) so you know exactly who your audience is as a writer.

\- They can otherwise make more complex product investments that will take the
open-source community a little longer to coordinate on.

Many of the points I mention above are possible in decentralized platforms,
they just haven't yet come together in a cost-effective (zero monetary cost
and high ease-of-use) way for writers.

------
IronCoderXYZ
Granted, publishing on Medium removes a lot of the author's own "branding";
but doesn't Medium also provide a certain level of visibility that would be
quite hard to obtain if one were to publish individually?

~~~
neurobashing
We're having this debate internally. I'm trying to motivate teams currently
blogging in Medium to come back to the new CMS we're building for the whole
company. Briefly, side A says, Medium is a well-known platform with good
discoverability and a great writing experience, and having a popular high-
ranked site outside of our core helps SEO. The other argument is mostly, we
want our web properties to be more than a brochure, we want the voice of our
company to speak "from it" rather than some other random place (even if one
presently popular), we should avoid moving between fashionable 3rd party
platforms, etc.

~~~
delinka
Can Medium function as a funnel to your CMS? I assume there's nothing
preventing a company or individual publishing on more than one place. Post to
Medium with links back to your CMS. Blurbs, teasers, full articles - whatever
suits your content and goals.

My point: it doesn't have to be an XOR choice.

~~~
neurobashing
you are correct, that's another facet of the debate (I tried to hit the high
points). The argument against that is usually "as long as I'm there why don't
I just write the damn article".

~~~
delinka
I mean, you don't write the article from scratch on each platform. The author
should, ideally, be writing it locally and then placing it in all the places
it's needed.

~~~
aytekin
They should publish on their blog first and then use the import feature of
Medium to republish it with a canonical to the original.

------
bfdm
> The main issue evergreen content is facing on Medium is that you can't
> update the date of an article.

Nor should you. The published date is immutable. You may, however, set a new
_updated date_ with your last update. We need to separate these ideas, because
there has been rampant abuse of rank preference for fresh dates. Tech (and I
assume non-tech) gossip sites are terrible for this.

They seem to update all articles to be mere hours or days ago in perpetuity,
despite no meaningful changes. This has to stop. It makes the dates
meaningless.

~~~
tkrunning
This is definitely true. What I'm referring to in the article is cases when
you've done a proper update of the article to make sure it's up to date, added
new information, etc.

I actually hope Google will start comparing versions of articles before/after
date updates, and penalize those that update the date without updating the
content.

~~~
bfdm
And while I appreciate good updated content, I still insist that the _publish_
date should not change. In your case, the publish date ought to be many years
ago. The _updated_ date, however, may be re-written with those refreshes.
Content should include both (when applicable) and indexes should reflect this.

------
Davis_OneUp
Had no idea that Medium got rid of the ability to canonical links to stories.
Very interesting...

Funny you mentioned HackerNoon and Upscribe, because I just did an interview
with the founder of Upscribe in my HackerNoon founder interview series.

He is a solo founder who has bootstrapped Upscribe to $4k MRR as a side
project: [https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-josh-anderton-
of-u...](https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-josh-anderton-of-
upscribe-18f831858456)

~~~
tkrunning
Ha, that's funny indeed!

I emailed with Josh a few times (regarding GDPR stuff) and he seems like a
great guy!

------
chapium
Tkrunning, I greatly appreciate the style used on your blog. Its very
functional and renders perfectly on mobile.

------
jwr
If you think Medium is bad, take a look at the horror that is blogspot. Loads
a ton of slow JavaScript, breaks scrolling, breaks the back button, flashes a
different article before showing the one you wanted…

I really do not understand how people put up with this, especially companies
that should care about their brand.

~~~
tkrunning
Luckily, it's no longer 2004, so no one in their right mind would start out
blogging there ;)

I personally prefer Jekyll or Gatsby on GH Pages or, even better, Netlify. But
if you're less technically inclined, WordPress.com is fine as long as you get
a custom domain.

~~~
jwr
> Luckily, it's no longer 2004, so no one in their right mind would start out
> blogging there ;)

You would think — and yet I stumble upon content there regularly. And my
comment was downvoted, so at least some people think this is OK.

------
fhennig
As a sidenote to this, what is a good way to follow independently hosted blogs
like this one?

I don't have a medium account but I suspect there are follow features and you
get a timeline of some sort.

The blog doesn't seem to have RSS (and is that even a technology people still
use?), so do I have to follow them on twitter?

~~~
tkrunning
I only set up this blog for this specific article, so haven't given following
much thought, but yes it does have RSS
([https://bts.nomadgate.com/rss.xml](https://bts.nomadgate.com/rss.xml)). And
people do still use that.

My main blog ([https://nomadgate.com](https://nomadgate.com)) offers more
options: RSS, web push, email newsletter, community forum, etc.

~~~
fhennig
Alright, I must've missed that somehow, thanks!

------
djhworld
The thing that's nice about medium is the social network around it, the claps,
the comments, the hooks into Twitter, the reccomendations for new content to
read etc

I post to my own blog, but really miss those hooks into the community. Maybe
ActivityPub will be a way to solve this

------
Theodores
Although content is king, there is a lot to be said for pushing the envelope
when it comes to design. With CSS Grid and other delights of HTML5 I think
that anyone wanting to write true 'evergreen' content needs to consider
document structure more, so article, aside, figure, nav and all of these other
tags get used.

I am currently working on a project with high resolution images and a 'deep
zoom' OpenSeaDragon viewer for these images. Why would I want to limit myself
to a platform or a CMS that does not allow this advanced presentation?

I just tried a Chrome Lighthouse audit on a typical Medium post:

[https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-titanic-was-
on...](https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-titanic-was-on-fire-for-
days-before-the-iceberg-hit-94fa26471dfa)

And the time to interactive given was 19 seconds for mobile. That is a bit
silly.

Evergreen content should not be dependent on another platform, it should rank
well if the document structure is really good, plus if the content is actually
there and people read it. I see no evidence of well crafted HTML5 documents
trouncing clickbait blog content on Google but I don't think it has been
tried, everything is a 'sea of divs and class tags' and not putting document
structure first. However, if I was wanting to write something that still was
relevant in 2028 then I would have to consider how the web would be crafted
then and it won't be a 'sea of divs'.

it depends also on whether comments matter, we all know from HN that the
comments are here and not there when it comes to useful articles, even if they
are on a prestigious site. For an evergreen article do you necessarily need
discussion and comments? If people are just learning how to take something
apart and fix it then they are just needing to takeaway that knowledge, not go
writing about it. If writing about some aspect of Brexit then that would be
something you might want comments about.

Really you need others to be writing about your content, with link to the
original article, not having them rip it off verbatim. But people that copy
aren't necessarily going to rank as well if they are not using screen reader
HTML5 and, if you do have something like a deep zoom tool to tell the story
then they cannot rip off the content for that very easily. Most writers though
are quite okay with stock Wordpress or other CMS and some lightly modified
them from somewhere. Actually that is too much effort and hence the success of
Medium et al.

------
bfung
Perhaps evergreen blog posts are an oxymoron?

I don't see my computer going back in time and updating a file in /var/log -
it's append only.

But regardless, the switch to a non-blog format is correct.

------
franciscop
Suggestion for the author:

body { margin: 0 auto; }

Makes a world of a difference to have the text in the center vs on one side of
a screen (which is worse the larger the screen is).

~~~
tkrunning
Good point! I'll update it :)

I just threw the site together in a few minutes before publishing the post
(experimenting with Gatbsy), so literally just added a max-width and changed
the font styles.

------
amingilani
Any ideas on what the trick for the redirect is?

