Are Medium Backlinks Good for SEO?

Not for rankings directly. Links inside Medium stories carry rel="ugc nofollow", which tells Google not to pass ranking credit, and Google treats that as a strong hint. A Medium backlink won't move rankings like an editorial link from a relevant site. What Medium can give you is readers, referral clicks, and a canonical tag pointing back to your original.

What we checked

Advice about Medium links often contradicts itself, so we looked at the markup. In September 2026, links to outside sites in the body of a Medium story were tagged rel="noopener ugc nofollow". Two of those values matter for SEO:

nofollow asks Google not to pass ranking credit through the link.
ugc marks the link as user-generated content, the attribute Google introduced in 2019 for links in comments, forums and other content that users post.

Since 2020 Google has treated both as hints rather than strict rules. In theory it may sometimes choose to count a link anyway, but you can't know when or whether that happens. Plan as if a Medium story link passes little or no PageRank. Dofollow vs nofollow links explains how the attributes differ.

Profile pages are a separate case. A link on one author's About page carried a plain follow value when we looked. Even so, a single bio link on a profile page with little internal linking is a weak signal, and it's not worth building a strategy around.

Why "high authority" doesn't help here

A common pitch is that Medium has a very high Domain Rating, so a link from it must be powerful. That mixes up two things:

A domain score doesn't pass to every page. Your story's authority depends on who links to that page. A new post with no inbound links is weak, whatever the domain's score. The same trap exists with .edu backlinks.
Nofollow stops what's left. Even a strong Medium page is asking Google not to pass credit through your link.

Put together, a strong domain plus a nofollow attribute plus an unlinked page gives you close to nothing in ranking terms. That's why paying for "Medium backlink packages" or spinning up throwaway accounts to post links is wasted money. It also looks exactly like the patterns Google's link spam systems are built to ignore.

What Medium is actually good for

Medium is a distribution channel, not a link source. Used that way, it does real work:

Readers you wouldn't otherwise reach. Medium has its own recommendation system, topic feeds and publications. A good story can find readers who would never have found your blog.
Referral traffic. Nofollow doesn't stop people clicking. Someone who reads a strong Medium piece and clicks through to your guide is a real visitor.
Secondary links. The more people read your argument, the more likely some of them are to write about it and link to your original page from their own sites. Those links can pass value. Medium's direct link rarely does.
Being found in more places. AI assistants and search tools pull from widely read third-party platforms as well as company sites. A well-argued Medium piece gives your brand and ideas one more place to be found and cited.

Republish on Medium the right way: use the import tool

The most useful SEO feature on Medium isn't the link. It's the canonical tag.

According to Medium's help centre, the Import a story tool backdates the post to the original date and "will automatically apply a canonical URL referencing the original source material." A canonical tells Google which version of duplicate content is the original, so it sends ranking signals to your page rather than splitting them. What a canonical tag is covers the details.

The order matters:

Publish on your own site first.
Wait until Google has indexed it. Check with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.
Import it into Medium from Stories → Import a story, pasting in your original URL.
Confirm the canonical is there. View the page source of the Medium version and look for rel="canonical" pointing to your URL.
Add a contextual link near the top, such as "the full version, with the data, is here," so readers have a reason to click through.

If you copy and paste instead, Medium has no canonical pointing to you. A copy on a large domain can then outrank the original for its own title. Does duplicate content hurt SEO? explains why, and do syndicated links count? covers how links on republished copies are treated.

Original Medium articles vs reposts

There's a second way to use the platform: write something new for Medium, often for a publication with its own editors and readers, and link to your site where it genuinely helps the reader.

That link is still nofollow. But a piece written for a publication's readers usually gets more engagement than a repost, and its editors act as a quality filter. Write for the readers who are there, not to plant a link.

When Medium is worth your time

Your goal	Is Medium worth it?
Improve rankings through backlinks	No. Story links are nofollow
Reach new readers in your topic	Yes, especially through publications
Get more use out of existing posts	Yes, with the import tool and canonical
Drive referral traffic to a key guide	Sometimes, if the piece is genuinely good
Build a quick batch of "high-DA" links	No. It's wasted effort and looks spammy

For ranking value you need links that are followed, sit inside relevant content, and come from sites in your field. That's the gap a direct exchange fills. Backlinkster matches you one-for-one with site owners in related niches, both links go inside real articles, and a real person checks each swap.

Frequently asked questions

Are Medium backlinks dofollow or nofollow? Links in the body of Medium stories are nofollow. When we checked in September 2026, they carried rel="noopener ugc nofollow". Google treats nofollow and ugc as hints, but you should assume a Medium story link passes little or no ranking value.

Do Medium backlinks help SEO at all? Not much directly. Their value is indirect: readers, referral clicks, and the chance that someone who reads your piece links to your original page from their own site. Imported stories also send a canonical signal back to your page.

Should I republish my blog posts on Medium? It can be a sensible distribution tactic. Publish on your own site first, wait for it to be indexed, then use Medium's Import a story tool, which adds a canonical URL pointing to your original. Pasting the post in manually doesn't add one.

Is buying Medium backlinks worth it? No. Story links are nofollow, new posts have almost no page-level authority, and batches of links from throwaway accounts match the patterns Google's link spam systems are designed to ignore. The money is better spent earning relevant editorial links.

The bottom line

Medium backlinks aren't a ranking tool. Story links are nofollow and new posts have little authority of their own. Medium is useful as a distribution channel: republish with the import tool so the canonical points home, write for the readers who are actually there, and count your success in visitors and secondary links rather than in Medium links.