Blog Post Exists on Medium and Personal Site - What to do?

[ImGandalfBrah]

Hello All,

So I bought out a competitor a long time ago when I was operating an e-commerce business. After several years we hit a decline so I stopped the e-commerce part of the business and kept it as a content site. It’s nothing amazing right now, but it has a lot of potential. Anyway…

The original owner had written a crazy long, well researched article on the main site and then also posted it on Medium. At the time, it was a good SEO strategy as it boosted the post to rank #1 pretty fast.

Overtime, the medium post started to outperform the main site and fast forward to today, the main site doesn’t rank for it at at all on the first page.

My question - what should I do with the post on my main site?

I know it’s most likely considered duplicate content because I’m trying to create an Adsense account to link to Ezoic and it keeps getting rejected.

I’m thinking that I need to delete the post and redirect it to another page. If you all agree, where should it be redirected? No other post on the site is similar in content.

Lastly, the post has a fair amount of backlinks and the post on medium also links to that article. I’ve reached out to the original owner for the medium post but I never got a reply back.

 

[Ryuzaki]

You don't need to do anything to either piece of content.

What you want to do is go to Medium and set a canonical up so that when Google crawls the post on Medium, it sees the canonical tag. This tag in the header means "give all the credit" (meaning links, rankings, etc) to the URL set as canonical, which would be the exact URL for this piece of content on your own site.

EDIT: I just noticed in the last line of the post that you don't have access to the Medium account.

In that case I'd probably hire someone to rewrite the post. I think Medium links are nofollow so you won't be getting any page rank juice from the links pointing to it, but at least it'll still point to your post if you keep it on the same URL. That solves the duplicate issue and the syndication issue, giving you a chance to rank again.

 

[secretagentdad]

Open the old post, rewrite it paragraph by paragraph,+ update it a bit and do some minor improvements to make it slightly longer.. Post on new account.
As long as its the same quality of article and you can get enough internal / external promotion to it for google to notice it should eventually replace the old one. They like to take the freshest option with big site mega articles unless the internal or external links are extremely disproportionate. Doing some internal commenting around on medium should be sufficient unless the old article got some serious attention somewhere.
You can do this for any problematic platform site article that has got something ranking in verticals you are in. This includes blatantly getting articles about your competition de-prioritized and replaced with rewrites that add very little beyond inserting your brand into discussion about the topic.
Its just generally good practice when you see a joinable platform showing up in your target serps, and very low effort relative to having to write an original article from scratch.
This advice does not apply to youtube it works different.

 

[ImGandalfBrah]

Based on the two suggestions, it sounds like rewriting the main site article is my easier option.

I’ll try reaching out the original owner again for the canonical link as well even though it’s a long shot