News Courtesy of Yoast.com:
To increase your reach, it could be worth your while to post some of your content on sites with more authority and more visitors than your own site. But it’s a good idea to think about how to do that. You may think ‘If many people see my post on a site like medium.com, they’ll automatically head over to my site to check out that post, increasing my traffic.’ But is that really the case?
You probably don’t want to end up with duplicate content, and it also isn’t in your best interest to be competing with high authority sites. So, how can you use these platforms, like Medium, to your advantage? Let me tell you what I think in today’s Ask Yoast!
There are several sites where you can publish your personal blog post and direct readers back to your website. I recently started using inbound.org for this very purpose. Unfortunately, I guess I started too late as I received a notice a couple weeks later saying they were closing. I have yet to try medium.com, but I’ve certainly heard the buzz about it.
I don’t agree with the SEO benefits you might gain for your own website through medium. To my knowledge, all external links to your posts are nofollow. That’s not to say you can’t get an audience through the platform. If you write an interesting post and people are enticed to click through to your blog, they might be inclined to read your other posts. If that’s the case, the user engagement should rise. This does affect SEO somewhat, so while you may not be getting any “link juice”, there is the possibility of a slight boost in the search engine results pages.
A good tactic you could employ is writing a teaser. Basically, write a two paragraph summary of your own article. But be sure to leave the reader wanting more. The goal is to get them to click on to your website. Sure, it is more work than just copying and pasting the first two paragraphs, but it will allow you to give a better picture of your post.