What should I do with my old Substack posts for best SEO?

Developer help Migrations
1

Like many others, I moved from Substack to Ghost. I have copied over all my posts to my main site, now hosted by Ghost Pro.

I have redirected my old substack through a CNAME DNS record to substack.mydomain.com.

My Substack posts still rank best on Google (My identical Ghost posts are lagging well behind). As a result, I still get subscribers through Substack.

I am asking everyone for their best advice on what to do:

-Should I just get rid of my Substack posts even though they rank well on Google?

-Could I implement some sort of redirect from the Substack posts to the equivalent Ghost post?

Why are my Substack posts better liked by Google?

Thanks

2

So you still use Substack at the same you use Ghost?

I’m confused about your current configuration.

Do you have newsletterName.Substack.com + yourdomain.com + substack.yourdomain.com right now?

I would not remove the posts already ranking on Google, I would redirect them to yourdomain.com. Because if you get rid of it is like throwing away your work.

3

I only publish on Ghost now, but my old substack posts still exist on substack.mydomain.com (and Google still ranks those links).

Making a redirect of substack.mydomain.com/* to mydomain.com is what I am considering, not entirely sure that’s possible technically as substack.mydomain.com is a CNAME record that is not proxied at Cloudflare.

4

Making the redirect should tell Google that the content moved.

But I wouldn’t make it yet. I would wait a bit more for Google starts indexing yourdomain.com while you still get some visitors to Substack. This way you wouldn’t have the risk of losing the traffic overnight

However, I’m not a specialist in redirects.

I’m talking from the perspective that I’ve seen a lot of people on Reddit complaining that Google is taking more time to index their website than in the past. So, that’s something to consider.

So, I would have a balanced move of not releasing more on Substack and not redirect things now

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5

@mattcam helped me implement a redirect solution for this via Cloudflare

6

@josephkman it was a pleasure working through this to help find a solution on the influencerTips digital marketing experience hub. For notes about using Cloudflare workers to do bulk redirect from Substack to Ghost have a read of the following …

https://www.influencer.tips/how-to-use-cloudflare-workers-for-bulk-redirects/

1 Like