Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Separate blog url helpful?
-
I am managing a website for a hotel brokerage firm. The main URL is www.hotelassetsgroup.com but we started a new blog with the URL www.hotelsforsaleblog.com. We chose the blog URL because it has the words "hotels for sale." The main website has a tab at the top titled "Blog" which links to the blog URL.
I am not sure if this is helping us or not because the main URL and blog URL are both competing for the name of the business "Hotel Assets Group." The blog has very little interlinking within the same URL because it mainly links to the main website. Should we combine the two URLs together and just have the blog URL be the same like- hotelassetsgroup.com/blog or something like that?
-
Hi Keith, Thank you for actually looking up the websites I was talking about. I think I am going to place the blog on the main url. Thank you!
-
Your answer was good as well. I can only choose three users to have a Good Answer status. Thank you for your help!
-
Thank you guys for your help. I am going to need to chew on this information and figure it out. Thanks!
-
In the long run, having a blog on your main domain is going to outweigh the benefits of having a separate one.
Google is looking for stronger brand signals and pooling all your great content and resources under one roof will play a key factor in SEO. If you have a blog on a separate domain and if you generate tons of links via social media.. all that "juice" is not being sort of 'transferred' to your main website, which I am assuming is the money maker.
Furthermore, Google is giving much less importance to 'keywords' in a domain. You can assume that keyword in domains is going to decrease in weight as a rank factor even more, as they can be 'gamed' easily so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Having a separate domain could make more sense for big brands especially if SEO is not of great importance.
-
I agree with Alan. Ideally the blog is on the same domain at a location like you suggested (hotelassetsgroup.com/blog). Having an a domain with the keywords are targeting is often helpful, but it's not the end all, be all for ranking for that or other key terms.
Check out this other thread, which is along the same lines: http://www.seomoz.org/q/which-is-better-for-linkbuilding-internal-or-external-blog
-
This is a tricky space Leslie.
I went through something similar with a fence contractor and we ended up with a bunch of worthless sites with exact match domains for various towns around the area.
In my case I found it easier to carry the authority of the existing site to rank for new keywords on a "blog" in a subdirectory rather than a new site.
Also, looking briefly at your sites, it looks like you are linking back and forth anyway so one doesn't really help the other. Because those links under "Latest News" flow through a feed proxy, they aren't really adding any SEO value to your blog as well (I could be wrong here, but I think there is a way to change the way those links show from a feed).
I guess if it were me, I would install the blog on the main URL. Seems like the whole site could work towards the same goals then....
Hope this helps, I look forward to seeing other responses.
-
I would agree with you. You have to ask yourself why do we have a blog. i find many people have one but dont know how or if it is helping them. Why have one on a different domain? To give links to your main site? Then why reciprocal link back to it? If your blog can attract a handfull of links under the same domain, it would out-weigh any links from your own blog on a seperate domain. (hope that makes sense)
I think having the blog in a subfolder or subdomain is the best use, you stand to gain links and traffic and you can use these pages to funnel PR to your home and landing pages, see link
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
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
-
Exact Domain Match does it help or distract?
Does owning / buying an exact domain match help or not necessary? For example our main website ranks for nearly 14,800 Keywords but one KW we are trying to get in the top spot for we are currently at the bottom of page #1. We do see an exact domain match available so we purchased it but i don't know if it would actually help us or distract us. I was thinking we could create an article about the keyword on that exact domain then do some on page seo and back linking. But would that be more of a distraction VS. just focusing on getting more high quality back links to the main website we have ranked on Page 1 at the bottom? Any ideas or benefits to use an exact domain match to help boost also?
Link Building | | Cfarcher0 -
Does embedded content (from my site) help seo
hi i am creating a new accommodation site and will have some great videos on it (fly bys of local beaches and virtual tours of hotels etc). from an seo perspective i have two questions: 1. should i host on my own site or youtube/vimeo - its a new site but in the long run i want my site to get the credit 2. i will be giving the hotels the chance to embed and video content i have on their own sites. does this help my own seo juice and if so is there a particular way it should be done. there will be around 90 well established local hotels in total so figured it should add up.
Link Building | | neilhenderson0 -
Moving blogs to different domain
Hey guys, We currently have some blogs on one of our pages (fraserisland.com.au) and we are launching a complete rebranding of our sites. We want to move the blogs from fraserisland.com.au to the new parent page of travelfreedom.com.au (but still link it to fraserisland.com.au), however I don't know what affect this will have on the ranking of the blogs. The biggest thing I'm worried about is that the domain will be completely different, and not a sub domain, but I'm not sure what impact this will have on the effectiveness of SEO on the blog. Thanks guys
Link Building | | Mysites0 -
URL parameters affecting link juice
I have a couple of quirks in my online shop that I'm ironing out. One of them is adding some URL parameters to product links.ie: website.com/product.html?&cat=0&featured=Y If someone links to this URL, will I get the link juice as if it was website.com/product.html ? I have URL parameters in Webmaster Tools and robots.txt set up to ignore them so they're not in the Google index, but I have found a few websites that have linked to us using these longer URL's and I'm wondering whether to write to them and ask them if they mind changing them or not.
Link Building | | sparrowdog0 -
A few questions I need help with and would appreciate any help.
I am currently building links to our website via estalished blogs ect (2+ years old), As far as I understand even if they are unrelated to what we do (print) as long as the post is about print the link should offer some value is this correct? Other questions I have which I would greatly appreciate advice in are as follows........ (1) Do charity websites or company websites with link pages ( about5-10 other links) or links / logo's on the front page offer value even on unrelated sites? (2) What happens if 80% of the link building I am doing comes from blogs? (3) If I have links that are clearly spam that have been built to our site can they be damaging our potential to rank and how can I remove them as I have tried to contact the relevant parties but fear pressing the button on the google tool may harm our site should I? (4) If I have a page that genuinely has a lot of mentions of a keyword (not so much the money keyword but part such as wanting to rank for pool table but end up with the different versions of keywords having table mentioned 5 - 10% of the time). Thank you for your time.
Link Building | | BobAnderson0 -
Should I link from my blog back to my product pages?
Hello... I just installed a blog on my Magento site. My question is whether or not i should be linking within posts on the blog back to the product or category pages that i am talking about...from an SEO perspective. If in my post i am talking about flashlights being important when preparing for a storm, should i link the word flashlights to the flashlight category on my site? I know I can do this, the question is should i, from google's perspective. A) should i link the word (flashlights) to that category on my page B) should i put a line at the bottom of every post that says something like "if you are interested in purchasing flashlights, visit this link" and hyperlink that whole sentence... THANKS!
Link Building | | Prime850 -
Too many links in my blog post created by comments. Should I worry?
Every year, we do a popular "Favourite pictures of the year" contest where people vote on the best picture (i.e: their mate's) in order to win something. But I just found that I'm going way over the "Too many links" limit and I think it's because of all the comments. 1. Is it a problem 2. Is there a way to de-activate the links? Thank you! 🙂 Ioan
Link Building | | IoanSaid0 -
Dofollow Blog Comments
I wanna buy dofollow comments, can be there any negative effects? I understand that is a kind of a black hat seo, but i saw many sites who used this type of service and get boosted in the search engine ranking.
Link Building | | Alexsmenaru0