Hey all,

I think Medium may have flagged my account again. This is the account I had reinstated after the spam suspension so maybe I was on a watch list or something.

It's more subtle this time though. I stumbled across the issue when checking if my recent article was indexed by searching the exact URL in Google. The screenshot shows the result.

So Medium is using a meta tag to prevent Google from reading the page content but not actually hiding the URL. Google knows the URL exists but cannot read the content and that presumably means rankings are never going to materialise.

Some Googling tells me the robots/nosnippet tag is what causes this to happen but the source code of the page only has this robots tag:

<meta data-rh="true" name="robots" content="index,noarchive,follow,max-image-preview:large"/>

... which suggests the page should be readable but not cacheable? The Medium robots.txt file doesn't seem to be causing it so I'm a bit flummoxed!

It's only just started happening though because my July articles do not suffer this affliction and a couple are ranking really well. Even got a featured snippet on one of them. I'm going to persevere for a bit and see if the articles come good after a period of time ... otherwise I think it's curtains for that account!

Anyone else seeing this?