# The day I almost ditched Medium. It turns out it was saving my site. 2025-06-21 ### Where is my site? Even a direct search for my name brought back Medium's logo at the top of the list. Why is Medium now my main digital footprint? Why did my digital home suddenly vanish from Google's search results? My first thought was that either the canonical setting was not working or Medium was ignoring it on purpose. ![[vladcampos.com/Static/Toolbox/Online Presence/What is a canonical link]] Maybe it was time to ditch Medium for good, I thought. It was a classic ‘guessing game’ moment, one I found myself falling into more and more recently, despite my background in the cold, hard facts of research and statistics. My father, my wife, and many people around me are researchers. In addition to that, scientific papers, numbers, statistics, etc., were frequent in my graduation and post-graduation courses. When did I start jumping to conclusions so easily? Perhaps it’s a byproduct of our social media-saturated world, where speculation often overshadows data. ![[vladcampos.com/_files/2025-06-21-the-day-i-almost-ditched-medium.png]] Anyway, before taking the radical step of telling my readers I'd be leaving Medium, I decided to take a deep breath and start doing some research online to try to understand what was happening. Among other things, my quest made me aware of the [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console/about), which was a huge rabbit hole I ended up in. But that’s a story for another time. Anyway, when I came across the explanation “**Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user**,” I was affected by another guessing moment and quickly blamed #Medium. Again! At this point, my brain was already at full speed trying to figure out a strategy to fix the “Medium problem” when I checked the “Links” menu and saw Medium at the first position of external links bringing traffic to my site. Not only that, but the number was much larger than the second item in the list. To give you some context, when you start using Google Search Console, the information is not all there at once. It gets built over the coming days after adding a site to be monitored. That lack of all the data probably also contributed to my guessing state. By the way, the “canonical issue” was about other links that had nothing to do with Medium. Anyway, that’s good news; it was not Medium. Thank you, numbers! But I was now back to square one. #### Obsidian Publish After a lot of reading and long conversations with #Gemini to understand all the tech terms I was coming across, it clicked when it mentioned something about the “Disallow search engine indexing” switch on #Obsidian Publish settings. “_Oh, s***_,” I thought, while that unmistakable feeling of “I did something very wrong” permeated my entire body. When switching to #Obsidian-Publish, it took me a while to import all my content from the old website, and I didn’t want Google indexing that big mess. That’s why I turned off the search engine indexing. What I completely forgot was to turn it back on, meaning that I completely erased my site from existence for many months. Unbelievable! ![[vladcampos.com/Static/Toolbox/Obsidian/Obsidian posts|Obsidian posts]] #### The Bright Side Since I cannot go back in time, I try to always learn something from my mistakes and also look for the bright side of things. And learn I did. A lot! Not just the ins and outs of #SEO, but also how important it is for me to regularly check my own online presence, especially since [[vladcampos.com/Action/💡 Consulting|I run my own business]]. From now on, I must create a task or a calendar entry for the future in cases like this. Knowing that I would lose Medium’s social element by not publishing there anymore, I had to bring back [[vladcampos.com/Static/Newsletter|my newsletter]], which was a detour that brought me into another deep rabbit hole. I told you I learned a lot. [[vladcampos.com/Timeline/Blog/2025/2025-06-18 • If you are fed up with Obsidian Publish's limited RSS, here's how I hacked a better feed.|Remember the better RSS feed I created for my website]]? Well, I can now set it as the source of my #newsletter, which I rebranded as “**Friday Fix by vladcampos**”. As the name implies, subscribers will get a list with links pointing to everything I shared during the week: articles, short posts, podcast episodes, and videos. If you’re curious to see what ‘**Friday Fix by vladcampos**’ is all about, [[vladcampos.com/Static/Newsletter|subscribe here]]. In hindsight, I’d say that the terrible mistake of blocking search engines from indexing my site ended up working as a trigger to making my online presence a bit better. As for Medium, how many times have you seen articles stating that it is terrible for your site?  I've seen many of those. But in my case, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Maybe because I always set a [[vladcampos.com/Static/Toolbox/Online Presence/What is a canonical link|canonical link]] to the original article on my site. Anyway, the Google Search Console is a good place to start if you really want to know if it's helping your site. In the end, using facts—numbers—is a great way to avoid guesswork. **Overall, have fun!** ![[vladcampos.com/Timeline/Blog/Posts|Posts]]