Syndication without cannibalization
Re-publishing on Medium, LinkedIn, and Substack the right way actually strengthens your canonical.
Direct Answer
Syndicating long-form articles to Medium, LinkedIn, Substack, and dev.to with a canonical link back to your site strengthens your authority instead of competing with it.
Syndicating long-form articles to Medium, LinkedIn, Substack, and dev.to with a canonical link back to your site strengthens your authority instead of competing with it.
The fear
Most agencies and in-house marketers refuse to republish their best content on Medium or LinkedIn because they're afraid the syndicated copy will outrank the original. That fear was correct in 2014. It has not been correct since Google formalized cross-domain canonical signals.
The rule
Every republished copy must set `rel="canonical"` (or its platform equivalent) back to the original URL. Medium does this automatically when you use its importer. LinkedIn Articles support a Canonical URL field. Substack has a per-post Canonical URL field. dev.to supports a `canonical_url` front-matter field. Hashnode has an Original Article URL field at publish time.
Do that, and the syndicated copy is treated as supplementary by Google and as an additional citation surface by every major AI engine. AI engines (especially Perplexity and ChatGPT Search) follow the canonical when picking which URL to cite — so the citation flows back to your domain even when the model first encountered the article on Medium.
The 7-day stagger we use
T+0 canonical on `leadstosalesagency.com`. T+1 LinkedIn personal teaser. T+2 LinkedIn long-form Article. T+3 Medium import. T+4 Substack import (and the on-site newsletter at `/newsletter/[slug]`). T+5 dev.to (technical posts only). T+7 a single Reddit comment in an on-topic thread, no top-level link drop.
Full playbook in `docs/geo/syndication.md` in our repo.
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