What would you do with this odd Blog configuration?
-
G'day fellow digital marketers!
I'm analysing a new site in analytics. Having been hit by Panda, and being plagued with a variety of issues - one that's got me scratching my head is their blog configuration.
Now, on most sites you'll have something like: www.clientsite.com/blog
All blog posts would then sit under the blog page: www.clientsite.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post
Anyway, on this blog - when a new post has been created historically - they've all been placed directly under the homepage, so when you click a link on: www.clientsite.com/blog
You instead arrive at: www.clientsite.com/this-is-a-blog-post
So, we have 150+ posts equally sharing the hompage authority - detracting from their ability to rank for their core services pages.
I'm thinking of going to town on the 301 re-direct wagon, changing:
www.clientsite.com/this-is-a-blog-post to www.clientsite.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post
But I'd like to know your thoughts and experiences before I get to work!
Thanks in advance guys and gals,
John.
-
In reality it's up to you. If you think the site makes more sense using the /blog/BLOGPOST format, then go for it. It can help search engines and users to understand that this is the blog section of the site. If all of your posts fall under a certain category or topic, you could also change the separator to use something that is more SEO-friendly, such as yoursite.com/marketing/your-blog-post.
The whole site and all the linked pages share your "homepage authority". Because you are not using a blog URL in between makes little difference. Your sitemap is the area that you can set the importance of these pages, which we generally set as a 5 or 6 out of 10 if you are concerned about the way that they show up in accordance with your main site in search results.
Also, it may take a bit of time to process all the redirects, so see if that is truly a matter of importance.
Hope this helps!
-
P.S. The 301 directs would add a time aspect that in my opinion would make me think twice. But if you dont mind re-directing the 150 pages go for it.
Either way dont worry. It should be fine.
-
Hi John,
Let me firstly say that this isn't as much as a problem as you think (at least in my opinion).
"So, we have 150+ posts equally sharing the hompage authority - detracting from their ability to rank for their core services pages."
This is simply not true as far as I am aware. Your homepage will only pass authority to the pages it links too. Just because they appear to be under the homepage directory doesn't really mean anything. Each page is treated as an individual and will only gain authority from those pages that link to it..
Now technically, yes from a good SEO point of view your blog posts should be /blog/subjectpost.html as it is both informative to the user and search engines by telling them this is part of your blog and is about whatever subject.
BUT... /blog/ doesn't tell people anything about the content of the post itself. Say the category is widgets, then /widgets/widgetkeywordpost.html is beneficial because it tells everyone visiting the page that this post is about widgets.
There will be a simple setting somewhere in ur CMS where it will decide where the post should be created. So changing this to /blog/ wont be too hard. If it were me, I would change it but only because OCD. I dont think you would be experience anything negative because of this.
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
-
Blog page ranked in a matter of hours, now what to continue climbing ?
Hello, I just published a blog page a few days ago and it currently ranks on 3 rd page for the keyword "loire valley bike tours". Something I haven't managed to do for years with my page that talks about tours in the loire valley. My guess is that I have better content on it. Now my question is : will it continue climbing (if so at what rate) or will it stay there unless I improve my content and get links to it or will google calculate its PR and have it slowly climb over time...without changing anything. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Post migration issues - #11 + configuration issue
Hello Moz community. I'm keen to find out your experiences on the following: Have you ever experienced a migration whereby a large % of keywords are stuck in position #11 - post migration? The keywords do not move up or down (whilst competitors jump from 13 to 9 and vice versa) over a three month period. Please see the % difference in the attached e-mail. (sample 1,000 keyword terms) Question: Has anyone ever experienced this type of phenomenon before? If so - what was the root cause of this and did this happen post migration? What solution did you use to rectify this? Have you ever seen a cross-indexing issue between two domains (each domain serves a different purpose) post migration, which impacts the performance of the main brand domain? I will explain a little further - say you have www.example.com (brand site) and www.example-help.com (customer service site) and the day the brand website is migrated (same domain - just different file structure), www.example-help.com points to the same server that www.example.com is on (with a different file structure) and starts to inherit the legacy file structure. For example, the following is implemented on migration day: I will explain a little further - say you have www.example.com (brand site) and www.example-help.com (customer service site) and the day the brand website is migrated (same domain - just different file structure), www.example-help.com points to the same server that www.example.com is on (with a different file structure) and starts to inherit the legacy file structure. For example, the following is implemented on migration day: For example, the following is implemented on migration day: www.example.com/fr/widgets-purple => 301s to www.example.com/fr/widgets/purple But www.example-help.com now points to the same server where the customer service content is now hosted. So although the following is rendered: So although the following is rendered correctly: www.example-help.com/how-can-we-help We also have the following indexed in Google.fr - competing for the same keyword terms and the main brand website has dropped in rankings: www.example-help.com/fr/widgets-purple [legacy content from main brand website] Even when legacy content is 301 redirected from www.example-help.com to www.example.com, the authority isn't passed across and we now have www.example.com (as per Q1) a lot lower in Google than pre-migration. Question: Have you ever experienced a cross-indexing issue like above whereby Google potentially isn't passing authority across from legacy to the new setup? I'm very keen to hear your experiences on these two subjects and whether you have had similar problems on some of your domains. E0hbb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMVSEO0 -
How to implement three languages with a subfolder /blog on a .com domain?
Hi, I'm setting up a blog for a client that has a .com domain. The client is targeting three languages with the subfolder /de, /nl and /en. We've also established that a blog rather be used in a subfolder than subdomain. My question: How should we implement the three languages? Is this gonna be a domain.com/blog/en or domain.com/en/blog or would you maybe don't use subfolders for language at all but let a hreflang do the job?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dexport0 -
What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?
I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs? The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41200 -
Blog Not Ranking Well at All in Search Engines, Need Help!
Hi Mozers, Need some help on a CMS I've been working with over the last year. The CMS is built by a team of guys here in Washington State. Basically, I'm having issues with clients content on the blog system not getting ranking correctly at all. Here's a few problems I've noticed: Could you confirm and scale these problems based upon being, "not a problem" "a problem" and "critical must fix" 1. The title tag is pulling from the title of the article which is also automatically generating a URL with underscores instead of dashes. Is having a duplicate URL, Title, and Title tag spammy looking to search engines? Are underscores on long URL's confusing google? Where shorter one's are fine (i.e. domain/i_pad/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keith-Eneix
(i.e.http://www.ductvacnw.com/blog/archives/2013/05/20/5_reasons_to_hire_a_professional_to_clean_your_air_ducts_and_vents), 2. The CMS is resolving all URL's with a canonical instead of a 301 redirect (I've told webmaster tools which preferred url should be indexed). Does using a canonical over a 301 redirect cause any confusion with Google? Is one better practice then the other? 3. The H1 tags on the blog pull from "blog category" instead of the title of the blog post. Is this is a problem? 4. The URl's are quite long with the added "archives/2013/05/20/5". Does this cause problems by pushing the main target keyword further away from the domain name? 5. I'm also noticing the blog post is actually not part of the breadcrumbs where we normally would expect that to populate after the blog category name, Problem? These are some of the things I've noticed and need clarification on. If you see anything else please let me know?0 -
Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us. Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog). We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum. We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to: 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed. Submit new site maps to search engines. Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.). Send out a newsletter to our subscribers. Update our forum members. Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure. Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period? OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains? Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally! Thanks Jay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DWJames0 -
301 redirects and Blogger - moving blog
Is there any way to add 301 redirects to individual posts on a blogger-hosted blog? We're getting ready to finally move our blog off of Blogger and onto our own webserver. We're probably going to use BlogEngine.net to run it. right now the blog is located at blog.MySite.com. We're probably going to move it to MySite.com/Blog. We don't have any really popular posts and we only really get ~10 visits a day on about 70 posts. Just trying to figure out the best way to handle this without inadvertently shooting myself in the foot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _JP_0 -
In order to improve SEO with silos'urls, should i move my posts from blog directory to pages'directories ?
Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max840