Medium's paywall rewrites your canonical tags—here's what breaks
Medium's paywall rewrites your canonical tags
Medium’s story importer silently changes canonical URLs when you cross-post behind a paywall—and that affects SEO in ways most publishers never notice.
The coffee’s gone cold while you stare at the page source of your latest Medium story, wondering why the canonical tag doesn’t point where you told it to. You cross-posted an article from your newsletter’s web archive, ticked the paywall box, pasted your original URL into the canonical field—and Medium rewrote it anyway.
This is the import tool’s quiet rewrite behavior. When you use Medium’s story importer to cross-post content behind the paywall, the platform handles canonical tags differently than it does for public stories. The change isn’t documented in the importer UI, and it can dilute the SEO signal you’re trying to preserve.
In today's email:
- How Medium’s import tool handles canonical URLs
- What happens when you tick the paywall box
- When the rewrite breaks your SEO strategy
- The workaround that preserves attribution