I know this is going to sound just like another complaint against Google, but I want my Google results to be better.

Medium and Pinterest are two sources with a large footprint on Google. If you want to search for an image, Pinterest occupies the front page, they used to snatch most of the first page with different Pinterest country-specific domains and subdomains.

If you are searching for a tutorial or want to read about a new concept, you are bound to come across one or more Medium articles on the first page of Google.

The Medium domain has lots of power behind it and there is a high chance a Medium article gets pushed to the front page, irrespective of the quality of the content.

So the problem occurs when quality content from small and independent bloggers is pushed to the 2nd or third pages of Google, and poor quality content gets pushed to the first page. An indie blogger won’t stand a chance against Medium’s position on Google results, especially if you are starting a new blog.

I’ve heard stories about some unfortunate bloggers who cross-posted their blog posts on Medium to divert traffic to their blog but ended up getting flagged by Google as a content farm because Medium has a better domain footprint over the indie blogger domain.

Also Medium has this wired paywall feature, where they only give 3 free articles per month if the publisher wants to put their posts behind a paywall. However, Google search results or Medium does not flag these are paywalled content.

So you end up clicking on one of those paywalled articles through Google search results, and you end us losing a free article, which you might have avoided clicking in the first place if you knew it was a paywalled article to save your 3 free articles of the month.

The Medium used to be a really good platform, especially when they were invite-only, and their editor was ahead of other blogging platforms, and when their UI was clean and simple.

Now the novelty is lost, the Medium UI is cluttered both for the reader and the writer. Most good publications that started on Medium like The Ringer, and Nib has moved to their own platforms,

I hope SubStack won’t follow the same path as Medium and start cluttering Google search results.