Medium render all links as ’nofollow’, so if you are using it for syndication to get page rank that might not work. If you decide to migrate medium posts then be careful about the link rel tags. This post describes some ways to remove the rel tags and why you should.

I was working through some client blog posts and noticed that they had a lot of links in blog posts which were marked as ’nofollow'.

The client is using Ghost and Ghost doesn’t seem to have a feature to create ’nofollow’ links.

I needed to work out:

• Why?
• How…
  • did they do this?
  • can I amend this?

But first, what are NoFollow Links?

What Are NoFollow Links?

A ’nofollow’ link is an anchor tag which has the rel attribute value nofollow e.g.

<a href="https://talotics.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Digital Marketing</a>

Google introduced the ’nofollow’ attribute to help site owners handle spam and comment links.

The ’nofollow’ attribute would tell search engines that the link is not one that the site owner endorses and they shouldn’t follow it.

This blog statement from Google in 2019 says that:

When nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal to use within our search algorithms

So orginally, links were not followed and didn’t provide any backlink benefit to the linked site.

Now they are used as a ‘hint’:

treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. We’ll use these hints—along with other signals—as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.

This means that ’nofollow’ might add some value, but most probably won’t because they are still not used for ranking:

We’ll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes.

Find the updated guidelines from Google for rel attributes on outbound links here.

Ideally we syndicate content to gain backlinks, so that our site ranks higher as a result. ’nofollow’ means the backlink won’t improve our page ranking.

A similar tag that Google introduced is the ‘ugc’ tag, this means ‘user generated content’. This seems to have a similar effect to the ’nofollow’. You can find Google’s documentation on rel tags here.

How did they do this?

It turns out that ’they’ didn’t do this. My client was hosting their blog on Medium, and Medium does this.

All links on medium are set to ’nofollow’, which basically means people are not getting any backlink authority from Medium, unless of course Google make an exception for Medium… but that seems unlikely.

This does mean that hosting your blog on Medium, even under a subdomain might not be adding the SEO benefits that you expect.

I have syndicated content to Medium to gain backlinks back to my site, but I now view Medium as an ‘attention’ backlink rather than an SEO backlink.

By posting on Medium I’m gaining another opportunity to get someone’s attention, but I’m not getting any SEO benefit from the backlink to help me with ranking. Sometimes, that’s a good enough reason for syndicating content, we just have to be aware of the details and factor that into our syndication strategy.

How can I amend this?

If I’m working with a page on Medium that I want to migrate to another site via a copy and paste into a rich text editor, I need to remove all the ’nofollow’ attributes prior to copying.

I can remove all the ’nofollow’ and ‘ugc’ attributes by running the following code from the JavaScript console:

for(elem of document.getElementsByTagName("a"))
     {elem.rel=elem.rel.replace("nofollow","").replace("ugc"."")
}

Then if I copy and paste the content, the rel tag will not contain ’nofollow’ or ‘ugc’

Or I could remove the ‘rel’ attribute entirely:

for(elem of document.getElementsByTagName("a"))
    {elem.removeAttribute("rel")}

This might be the simplest option.

I could also do this if I find any nofollow links on my client site by looking at the public or preview page, removing the ‘rel’ nofollow content, and then copy and pasting it back into the CMS.

How can I find nofollow links?

The SEO Minion chrome plugin does a good job of identifying the ’nofollow’ links on a page that you are viewing.

So if you are manually auditing your site, add SEO Minion, and a checklist item to examine the ’nofollow’ links.