Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

SEJeff

Original link: http://engineering.ifttt.com/data/2015/10/14/data-infrastruc...

Can a moderator such as dang fix this please?

View on HN

Yes. Url changed to that from https://medium.com/engineering-at-ifttt/data-infrastructure-....

Medium's republishing API has already become a problem for original sources on HN.

p.s. Comments in the threads are an unreliable way to reach us. There are too many for us to see them all. The reliable way is to email hn@ycombinator.com.

He is probably just syndicating this to medium with the new api's introduced.

To hijack your tongue-in-cheek comment...I genuinely would appreciate it if someone, at some point, looked at analytics before and after syndicating to Medium to not just compare number of visitors between the original blog and Medium, but whether PageRank for the original blog dropped due to duplication penalties applied by Google's algorithm.

It's worth nothing that Medium described this syndication workflow as an expected use case during the announcement.

I don't think they would have done that if there was a knowing SEO downside. It would hurt everyone.

I want to take them at their word...but it's more up to Google, isn't it? And doesn't Google still rely (in part) on the canonical meta tag to resolve duplicates? Currently, the posted Medium post has this:

      <link rel="canonical" href="https://medium.com/engineering-at-ifttt/data-infrastructure-at-ifttt-35414841f9b5">

It would be relatively easy for Medium to appropriately set that tag -- I mean, if "original URL" is captured somewhere in the API, or in the Medium post-create-admin interface (I don't know, I haven't logged into my own Medium for awhile)...that would explicitly resolve the ambiguity, though at an obvious cost to their own SEO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com