Does Blog Look And Feel Have To Match Site Look And Feel?
-
For years I've run WidgetsAdvice.com as a standalone blog. It's done well, 4k uniques a day, 5PR site. But it's standalone.
I recently purchased Widgets.com, which doesn't get much traffic and is only a PR2. To help grow Widgets.com, my obvious desire is to move the blog (WidgetsAdvice.com) over to Widgets.com and have it sit there as: www.Widgets.com/blog so I can get the good google juice to start flowing to Widgets.com
Yes, I know it's important to do the page redirects properly, etc. That's not my question.
My question is: Do they have to look the same? The page design of Widgets.com is very different than the blog. When I move the blog over, do I HAVE to make it have the same look and feel as the larger site? Does google penalize you if your blog has a different page design than the site it is blogging for?
My preference would be to simply move the blog over and change nothing... maybe change the menus to point to the larger site, etc.
But will google not like it looking different?
(Widgets is obviously an example... my site name is different)
-
In which case go for it if that's all that matters. User experience may be affected, depends on the designs, though as SEO is your only concern here, you're all set to press ahead
-
It is indeed, I already answered that question though; you won't be penalised by Google purely for different designs.
-
All I care about is the google juice.
-
Ok. That's my thing. I can lead people to my main site... I'm just wondering if Google cares if the site look and feel matches. If not? Then fine. I can deal with that.
-
Right... but the question is... does Google care?
-
Exactly, a good answer from James. For a positive user experience, 'Familiarity' is key, many visitors don't like surprises and will leave quickly if they feel lost or unsure of what they are looking at, so keep the Blog's design and style similar to that of your main website.
Doesn't have to be an exact copy of style and design, just easily recognisable that your blog and your website are Your blog and your website, that the two are related.
This isn't for search by the way, you won't be peanalized by Google if your blog and website have different designs (only if the designs are poor and crawling, speed etc are an issue, could you be peanalized). User Experience is key here rather than Search.
Regards
Simon
-
It is advisable to match the style of the blog's with your main website.
From a design point of view it is always something I advise site owners to implement.
From a cross site branding point of view too it will look a bit funny if you do not use the same design.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to find out that none of the images on my site violates copyrights? Is there any tool that can do this without having to check manually image by image?
We plan to add several thousand images to our site and we outsourced the image search to some freelancers who had instructions to just use royalty free pictures. Is there any easy and quick way to check that in fact none of these images violates copyrights without having to check image by image? In case there are violations we are unaware of, do you think we need to be concerned about a risk of receiving Takedown Notices (DMCA) before owner giving us notification for giving us opportunity to remove the photo?
Web Design | | lcourse1 -
Is switching from a very old HTML table site to HTML5 going to make a big difference
Hello, My site owner has been having calls that our old HTML site needs to switch to HTML5. Is it really worth the ubgrade from an archaic HTML site? Please explain. Bob
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Site is getting crushed by spam traffic and Google Webmaster Tools giving crawl warnings. Also...
Currently hosting a site I'm planning on moving to a new server ASAP, 301 redirecting and have a domain that has nice authority and very old. On the current site I need to clean up the blog. I have a few questions actually.... 1. I'd like to remove most of the blog articles as I want the new site to be very high quality, but isn't it dangerous to do a 301 redirect to the same page for all these articles? 2. I want to focus on the new site as the current site has too many issues but still managing to hang in their. is highly outdated yet I don't want to spend a ton of time on the site before the 301 redirect. With the Pigeon and Panda 4.0 rumors being released soon, I want to get the new site completed ASAP. Do you think it's better if I fix the 3. Would removing cloudflare make things better or worse with the crashing of my site due to high traffic (mainly spam on the blog.) 4. My best article by far is outdated, but should I waste time updating it before redirecting or should I just get the new site going? I did way too many guest posts thinking content is king, but at least checked the outgoing links Domain Auth, Page Auth, and MozTrust in OSE, but first off I'm going to remove a page that mentions I'm looking for guest bloggers. I tried to keep the posts relevant but at the time you could get away with 5. Anything I can do to slow down these spammers on Wordpress? I noticed most of them are checking for vulnerabilities but I'm keeping it up to date, have caching setup. Thanks!
Web Design | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
When Site:Domain Search Run on Google, SSL Error Appears on One URL, Will this Harm Ranking
Greetings MOZ Community: When a site:domain search is run on Google, a very strange URL appears in the search results. The URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com:2082/ The page displays a "the site's security certificate is not trusted." This only appears for one URL out of 400. Could this indicate a wider problem with the server's configuration? Is this something that needs to be corrected, and if so how? Our ranking has dropped a lot in the last few months. Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Pointless copy on product list pages makes me feel compromised...
When working on ecommerce websites we insist that product list pages need at least 250 words of copy that is optimised for our keyword phrase ... lets say "17 inch bike frames". So we have some crappy copy written that goes something like this.... "We have a great 17 inch bike frame for you whatever your requirement. Take a look at the frames below .... blah blah blah totally pointless text blah blah blah........." This text is of no use to the user as the page is merely a means of them getting to a suitable product page. However, the copy is pretty essential if we want to rank well for "17 inch bike frames" and not having copy on product list pages could land us in hot water with Panda ...especially if we have lots of them on a site using the same page template and with no copy on them. Does anyone else feel uneasy with adding this crappy text to pages? It's only there for search engines and that is something that Google say's we shouldn't do but I know for sure they're not going to rank me as well if I don't have it. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinion on this. It's always annoyed me. Does anyone have any good tips for making this type of copy on product list pages less forced and crappy?
Web Design | | QubaSEO0 -
URLs appear in Google Webmaster Tools that I can't find on my own site?!?
Hi, I have a Magento e-commerce site (clothing) and when I had a look through some of the sections in Google Webmaster Tools I found URLs that I can't find on my site. For example, a product url maybe http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/ which is fine. In that product there maybe three sizes of the product (Small, Medium, Large) and for some reason Googlebot is sometimes finding a url like: http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/1202/ has been found and when clicked on is a live url (Status code: 200) with is one of the sizes (medium). However I have ran a site crawl in Screaming Frog and other crawl tests and can't seem to find where Googlebot is finding these URLs. I think I need to: 1. Find how Googlebot is finding these urls? 2. Find out how to keep out of index (e.g. robots.txt, canonical etc.... Any help would be much appreciated and I'm happy to share the URL with members if they think they can have a look and help with this problem. I can share specific URLs which might make the issue seem clearer, let me know? Thanks, Darrell
Web Design | | clickyleap0 -
Visits to Site and Serps?
Do google and bing factor in how many people visit your site per month to determine your serps rankings? If so, does it matter if they visit your site by searching a keyword phrase or by typing in the name in the search bar? My instinct tells me that if the search engine sees 1000 hits per month for a site by keyword phrase and that is high for the industry then they might rank that site higher in the serps. I was wondering if the same would be true if the site is designed and coded properly for a keyword phrase but receives the same 1000 hits per month from visitors typing in the sites name in the search field rather than the search phrase, would that then translate to higher rankings for the keyword phrase? Thanks for your help.
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Too Many On-Page Links for my Blog
Hi, I have created a SEO Moz campaign for my travel blog www.EspaceVoyage.net. The Crawl diagnostics tool raised a warning saying that for few pages I have a 'Too many on-page links'. All the problematic pages are of the following style: http://www.espacevoyage.net/2008/08/01/ http://www.espacevoyage.net/2008/08/02/ http://www.espacevoyage.net/2008/08/06/ .... I am not sure what I should do with that ... Since I continue to publish articles on that blog I imagine that that problem will keep growing and growing ... What should I do with that? Thanks P.S. That blog uses Wordpress CMS. Nancy
Web Design | | EnigmaSolution0