Improving Discovery on Medium with Tags

Check out the new tag pages

Tatiana Colligan
The Medium Blog

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Recently we’ve launched some updates to the tag pages on the web to improve discovery.

Tags are keywords and keyword phrases that are added to stories by the writer to improve story discovery and categorization. A writer can add up to five tags per story.

tags in the post editor
Tags in the post editor

These tags appear at the bottom of a post, and readers can click these tags to see all similarly-tagged stories on Medium.

tags at the bottom of a post
Tags at the bottom of a post

You may notice that we updated the design of tag pages and kept most of the features, including: related tags, a list of top writers, and ability to sort posts by date.

Screenshot of medium.com/tag/future tag page
Screenshot of medium.com/tag/future tag page

The biggest change lives behind the scenes: a new algorithm powers the list of presented stories. This new algorithm sources stories from a much wider range of authors than before, which will allow more new and existing writers to get discovered and find their audience.

There are also several new filtering and sorting options:

  • Popular: shows articles that are new and gaining in popularity.
  • Latest: shows all posts published within a tag in reverse chronological order (and we’ll make sure to filter out spam).
  • Top: shows the most popular stories in a selected period of time. Users can filter by current week, month, year, or all time.

These filters are meant to help readers dive deeper and discover more content on Medium, no matter how long ago it was published and no matter how niche or obscure the topic is.

Describing the bigger picture, Ev Williams wrote that Medium

“is perhaps the only place where someone with no industry connections, no investment, no social followers, and no technical or marketing expertise can show up and offer a story or idea to the world that finds an audience of thousands or even millions of people.”

With the latest tag page update we are making sure we are delivering on that promise.

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Tatiana Colligan
The Medium Blog

Product Manager and SEO. In the past: @Medium, Macy’s, ModCloth. Fan of Web3. Working Parent. Curious Person. https://twitter.com/TatianaColligan