Medium Backlinks: A Complete How-to Guide For Beginners

As we all know, Medium is a platform where we can increase our social media reach by posting new and quality content for our target audience, and all for completely free. Currently, Medium has almost 143 million traffic per month, which you can use for free.

Basically, on Medium, you can post quality content, and repurpose the content you have already produced and the best part is that you can actually acquire backlinks from the Medium platform.


Obviously, there are some drawbacks to these backlinks but some benefits also belong to these backlinks.


Today, in this article, I am gonna talk about what Medium backlinks are, how to build them (and the most powerful way to build them that actually gives results faster than ever), and some cautions and tips to build backlinks from Medium effortlessly and smartly. So, keep reading.


What are Medium backlinks?

Medium backlinks are those backlinks that come from Medium and point toward your website. We all know that Medium is a kind of social media website like Facebook, Instagram, and the list goes on but the main difference is that you can’t share a short post here, and you can’t share even images here directly. The only thing you can share here is short or long articles that are filled with valuable information and if possible with interesting images.


That’s why you have to write quality content for your Medium account or Medium blog for the best results. I know that it can be time-consuming. I also had that problem. But, you can reduce the time and even repurpose your content on Medium with a link back to your content. I will discuss it in the next few sections.


When it comes to Medium there are some benefits as well as some drawbacks for the backlinks. Most of the time almost always, they are nofollow. Which means you don’t get any link juice from Medium. But, there are some super powerful and noticeable benefits. Let’s talk about them below.


Benefits Of Medium Backlinks

Medium Has A High Domain Authority

The medium as a well-known site also has a high domain authority which is almost nearby 95. However, 95 is obviously a high number. First, let’s know what is domain authority and why it matters when building backlinks.


Domain authority is the metric that is maintained by Moz which shows us the quality of the backlink profile of a website on the internet. This comes insanely handy when we determine whether we should build a backlink for our website from that website.


Also, when determining spam score is a super powerful metric that helps us to determine how many spammy backlinks a website has. There is no direct connection between google rankings and these authority or third-party metrics but these have an indirect connection.


Think of it, when a website has a high domain authority, it has backlinks from quality websites that do follow. And the websites that have high-quality backlinks, obviously, tend to rank better. So the formula is: The higher the authority is the higher it will rank on google.


Secondly, if a website has a lot of spammy links then it’s not a qualitative or powerful website. Google hates those websites which get a lot of links from other spammy websites. The websites that have so, are considered low-quality spammy websites, in the eyes of Google.


Medium has a spam score of less than 11% and domain authority is above 90. This means a golden website

The Backlinks are Contextual

Contextual backlinks are those backlinks that come from content and point toward your website. That can be for any reason for mentioning any of your articles, any of your research reports, or whatever it is.


Google loves these types of links for some actual reasons.

  • These backlinks actually create value in the content and give actual helpful information to the readers. That’s why google relies on these types of backlinks as they tend to be more relevant than some other types of general links.

  • As I said, these links actually give readers helpful information. Which means a better user experience. And google loves user experience and as a result, contextual links.

Also, these backlinks give you referral traffic. I will talk about it in the next section. These are also the reasons why backlinking tactics such as guest posting, and article submission are currently in such high demand in the market of SEO services.


But the main thing is that you can easily acquire these contextual backlinks as many as you can for completely free with the site Medium.com.


These backlinks give referral traffic

As we know that these backlinks are contextual means these are placed in the content for a particular reason which is to give extra value to the readers.


The best thing is that these backlinks give referral traffic. Referral traffic is the total number of page views you get through some quality backlinks from other websites. In short, these are the traffic that is referred by other websites to your website, rather than search engines.


Now the number of traffic also depends upon the total number of traffic the referring domain has. Also, the traffic depends on how the quality of content the site produces.


For the first question, does Medium has enough traffic for referring? Yes, Medium has almost 142.1 million visits each and every single month. That’s a lot. And for the second question, does Medium produces quality content? Actually Medium does not produce quality content, many experts in various industries write quality content on their own and publish it on Medium in order to grow their reach.


That’s why Medium backlinks play a significant role in traffic for those websites that keep active interaction in Medium.


Drawbacks of Medium backlinks

There are some significant drawbacks of Medium for building backlinks. Let’s know some of the important ones.

These backlinks are nofollow

All of the Medium backlinks are no-follow. This means you can’t get link juice from Medium. Medium being a high domain authority site wants to keep up the score that’s why they don’t want anyone to steal what they have.


That’s why these backlinks have little to 0 effects on ranking. A dofollow link can pass the link juice and increase your rankings but a nofollow link can’t.

Keyword cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is a term that is used when you have targeted the same key phrase on more than one page of your site and search engine indexing all of them. Now, what will happen? The search engine crawler will be confused about which page of your website should be ranked on the SERPs because all of them are targeting that same keyword.


This can lead to a low rank on SERPs on all of your pages. However, Google can warn you if you have duplicate pages but that is a lot of headaches.


Now, when you import posts to Medium it usually keeps a “rel=cannonical” to your link which means it is saying to search engine crawlers that it’s an imported duplicate content of that page. 

This can make it harder for Google to choose which should be ranked, your article or your medium article as both have the same content. This can be the start of your problems.


To avoid this problem you can write original content and spend some time optimizing the content for SEO and post it on Medium. That will lead to a time-consuming backlinking process.

It takes time to give results

Yes, everything takes time on the internet. If you have a Facebook profile with at least 100k followers then you might know how much time and effort it took to see good results on that profile. This same thing applies when you are trying to grow your Medium account.


At first, no one will read your content and like it. That's why if you are going to Medium to see an immediate spike in traffic, your lead list and so on then don’t do it. Because you are not going to get results.


How to build Medium backlinks?

Building Medium backlinks are easy but if you do it wrong then you will see the results but later. In this article, in the next few sections, I will tell you how you can create effective backlinks and content on Medium that helps you get more followers easily and get some traffic from Medium at the beginning of your Medium journey.


Collaboration is the Key

As in youtube, and normal blogs, here for Medium collaboration can give you faster results than ever. Here you have to find some potential influencers in your niche who are actively posting on Medium, connect to them, pitch yourself and then get a backlink.


Find Potential Influencers On Medium

You have to search for different keywords related to your industry on Medium. See who is ranking on the top and gets the most claps. The more the claps are the more viral the articles are. Open each of them and check out the author's profile. Check out if the author regularly writes content on your industry or luckily, one of his articles went viral.


Now, follow all the collaborators that meet your QUALITY STANDARDS, which means collaborators who has some significant follower and regularly writes content. Now, list all their names up.

Create Content Collaborators will love

Now, you have to see what they are linking to already. I mean are those articles, images, videos, or what? If that is something you can create then create it.


Post your valuable content on Medium and your blog and obviously, optimize them for SEO. Because why leave some potential traffic that you could get easily without any prior efforts?

Show Interest On Their Content

When you have created content you can’t just go and pitch your content saying “hey, it’s great content created by me, that’s actually worth linking to. Would you like to give me a mention in your future articles?” He will just delete your message and block you.


Instead, you have to go and post some actually valuable comments on their content that gives inspiration and make them remember your name. Do this in many of their articles with a short time included between them. Because if you do all these things then Medium is going to ban you.

Pitch them your content

Now, you have created your content and made a relationship with the man, now, you have to create a conversation. Most of the time, this will be created during the commenting period. But, if not, then go and Hi. Start creating conversation like you are friends.


Now, you can pitch your content to him. This will make your pitch more effective and higher chance to get a mention in your Medium content or even directly to your blog post.

The Direct Method

In this method, you have to write quality content and publish it on the Medium of your own. This takes time because you have to create quality content and then grow your profile slowly. It’s best to follow both methods at once to get the fastest results.

Write Quality Content

“You have to write quality content”, we have said this line almost a thousand times. But for Medium it’s a bit more. You have to write content that is optimized for SEO.


You have to treat Medium as a new blog that is owned by you and you can’t just publish your articles here. You have to do keyword research and then write the content. You have to make sure your content ranks on Google. And that’s not so tough if you can do the on-page SEO perfectly.


Now you have to just keep your articles published by doing SEO and wait to see results.


Final Thoughts

Medium has some potential drawbacks but the benefits are better than that. However, it’s a bit time-consuming and dangerous because you have to do a lot of things. But you can actually get your desired results if you can. Follow these above guidelines to get all these things done properly.