The Easy Secret Weapon for Effective Cross-Posting on Any Platforms--Canonical Links

Enjoy a bigger audience and make more money . Anyone can do it. Post your stories on multiple sites or platforms without getting dinged by search engines for duplicate content

Photo by Danielle-Claude Bélanger on Unsplash

Search engines hate duplicate content. To them, it’s spam. But it’s easy to publish your great stories on Vocal, Substack, Medium, and Wordpress without mucking up their SEO. I’ll tell you how. Take notes.

My audience grows exponentially when I post a story on multiple platforms — assuming the content relates to the audience I have assembled on each platform. My authority, that is, the degree of expertise I exhibit, is also enhanced. But I needed to understand canonical links. You may also see them called canonical urls, rel=canonical link, or canonicals. All the same pipeline to a wider audience.

Canonical means related to rules or laws. Let’s look at the rules for cross-posting.

Search engine spiders hate duplicate content

They read it as a content writer’s attempt to overwhelm internet users with the same message and no added benefit. It’s similar to how politicians advertise in election years. However, I may have an audience of freelancers on one writing platform, and my work may be targeted at writing teachers on another. Both groups would find my article about rhythm in writing useful.

Popular platforms to publish on:

• Blog platforms: WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Vocal

• Self-publishing sites: Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), Barnes & Noble Press, IngramSpark

• Subscription-based platforms: Substack

• Social media: Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack Notes

If I just copy my story from one writing platform to another, any or all of these can happen:

• One version gets indexed — the others are invisible.

• Multiple versions may be indexed, but the search engine chooses which to rank on their results page.

• All versions are blocked and not indexed.

• Certain online ad accounts could be suspended.

• Tools like Yoast SEO checker or Semrush will flag duplicate content issues on your blog.

Keep credibility with canonical tags

My goals are to increase visibility, attract more readership from varied audiences on multiple platforms, and enhance my online presence. I work hard to maintain my expertise and authority, so I need to protect it. When I place canonical tags correctly, stories get traffic from different platforms, and more than one may rank significantly on search engines so new readers discover me.

There’s no mystery to it; a rel=canonical just means I enter a URL of the original article or of the version I want search engines to see as authoritative. But the tag has to be placed correctly, so search engines decide to deduplicate what they see and rely only on the version I designate.

Keep in mind that the links aren’t absolute. If I try to hoodwink the spiders by using canonicals to promote spam or poor content, they can choose to ignore me, my canonicals, and my spammy writing.

Use canonicals between Vocal or Substack and Medium

Medium.com provides a specific way to enter a canonical link without having to access the meta heading of the story. Don’t worry about what that means, just do the following to add a canonical link to a Medium post. That link will direct search engines to consider a different instance of your story as the primary version.

1. Find More story settings in the three-dot menu of your story or draft on Medium.

2. Scroll to the bottom of the story settings page and find Advanced, under which you will see Canonical links.

3. Copy the story’s url from Substack or any other platform and paste it in.

4. Medium puts the link into the proper header automatically.

Now here’s the inside secret trick

Most platforms have a way for you to access the meta header; you can search their documentation to figure that out. Substack does not allow user access, and to my knowledge, neither does Vocal. But fear not. To use canonical links between Substack or Vocal and Medium, post the story on Substack and on one of the others and designate the Substack version as the authoritative one.

It doesn’t matter which platform you put the story on first — just be sure you remember to add the canonical link to Medium as described above. I do it all the time, and my search engine referrals are always strong.

Check your work

If you habitually rewrite or extensively tweak stories so they’re substantively different from platform to platform (including titles and tags), you probably don’t need canonical links. In all other cases, you do.

• If the main text content of a duplicate page is very similar, if not identical, to the canonical page—it’s duplicate content. Use canonicals.

• Only list the canonical link once, in the right spot, and do not repeat the link. More is not better.

• Be certain that the url you use for the canonical link is exactly right with no errors and that it resolves to the story location you want to be seen as primary.

• Don’t try to use canonicals to point to or from landing pages, related pages, or even page 2 of a given story.

Last words to the wise

If you want to cross-post but prefer to make each story unique, substantial rewrites may be in order. It’s hard to grok what any search engine may see as a duplicate. You can tweak the content for each platform but don’t just change a sentence or two — aim for obvious changes, including updates of titles, headings, captions, alt text, images, or video.

As for posting the same content multiple times a day on multiple platforms — that’s spammy, and it will result in bad consequences, possibly including being banned from a search engine. Cross-posting can be very effective in growing your audience and your revenue. But as with all writing conventions, you have to know what you’re doing.

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