It seems that Medium, the popular publishing platform, hasn't been doing too well in Google over the past couple of months - especially since December. And it seems like it is getting worse. Some are saying the site has 40% declines in organic visibility from Google search.
Bartosz Góralewicz posted on Twitter:
Medium lost 40% of their SEO visibility 🤯 this is interesting as a few months back I was using @Medium 's example to show a massive technical SEO issue with Medium's (and other website's) content not being indexed in Google. https://t.co/MnMNfMa6Se :O CC: @TomekRudzki pic.twitter.com/P9aJSDhJKg
— Bartosz Góralewicz (@bart_goralewicz) January 3, 2020
Here is the SEMRush chart, this shows more of a 30% drop from October to December:
But it looks like the first week in January, at least according to SEMRush, Medium has taken a deeper dive:
The question is why? Is it a technical issue like Bartosz thinks or did SEOs ruin Medium as well? I mean, did SEOs take too much advantage of the platform where Google had to do some course correction? I don't know.
Glenn Gabe thinks it is more of a relevancy thing versus a technical thing:
Nice catch. BTW looks like it started to surge after the 11/8 update, then began to crash on 12/19. Maybe a combo of things going on there (tech SEO included), but also looks like a relevance adjustment. It was ranking for some insane head terms (w/articles that shouldn't.)
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 3, 2020
There are lots of theories:
I just had a quick look and there are multiple critical technical SEO issues to fix. I wish big brands took technical SEO seriously BEFORE they lose traffic. @Medium is an amazing platform and they are responsible for a lot of content.
— Bartosz Góralewicz (@bart_goralewicz) January 3, 2020
There were various Google algorithm updates on the dates this site saw some declines. But the decline seems to be somewhat more gradual, which implies this is more than just a technical issue?
What do you all think?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
