One Reason Not to Publish With Medium Publications

For custom domain owners, specifically

I recently connected a custom domain to my Medium profile.

That means my profile is not just accessible from the usual Medium domain with medium.com/@burkrosemann or burkrosemann.medium.com, but also from my own subdomain stories.byburk.net.

A custom domain has some upsides:

1. Traffic from Medium views and reads count toward my domain and raises my domain authority

2. It helps with brand identity, as most of my content lives under byburk.net domains and subdomains

It also has downsides:

1. I lose Medium’s high domain authority score of 95 (100 is the max)

2. Connecting a custom domain requires a Medium membership

Custom domain & publications

Another interesting thing is that I now have more reason to self-publish posts, instead of going with Medium publications.

Here’s why!

When I publish a publication like Illumination, my article lives under its Medium profile (https://medium.com/illumination).

If I publish with Better Humans, it lives on its own domain because they have connected a custom domain to the Medium publication (https://betterhumans.pub/).

In those two cases, traffic from my stories benefits Medium and the Better Humans domain.

If I self-publish, however, the traffic goes to my subdomain stories.byburk.net, helping it grow, and increasing its search engine rankings.

If you run your Medium account on a custom domain, remember this!