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.
Blogs are best when hosted on domain, subdomain, or...?
-
I’ve heard the it is a best practice to host your blog within your site. I’ve also heard it’s best to put it on a subdomain. What do you believe is the best home for your blog and why?
-
Andrew while I agree with what you say, is there not a greater risk if your blog is hacked and then a hacker may gain access to the server where as on a sub-domain the blog can be on a different server?
-
Just because you have WordPress running your blog, doesn't mean WordPress has access to edit the files of the main eCommerce site. You can install a standalone WordPress blog in examples.com/blog and have regular HTML files serving example.com
You can also takes steps to secure your WordPress installation on top of this.
-
Agree that blogs are best in a sub folder BUT if you have an ecommerce site it is best practice to have your blog on a subdomain
This is purely for security reasons, if your wordpress blog gets hacked, the hackers will not gain access to your eCommerce site as it is on a different server
-
Rand agrees with this approach too - just check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites/
"Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."
There's also this: http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/blog-hosting-external-subdomain-subdirectory-best-seo/ which may help as well.
-
Thanks for the expanded explanation! Onward and upward then...
-
Subdomains are a dangerous choice unless you know exactly how to deal with them from a high level SEO perspective because it's too easy to miss all sorts of issues.
Just one example (and it goes way beyond "losing a very very small amount of link juice):
Even though you get the SEO value at the root domain level even in a subdomain scenario, since you use www for the main site, that itself is considered a subdomain. So the main site (the www subdomain) still doesn't get all the strength value from new content, inbound links, and social mentions for the blog subdomain.
Even then, if you were to switch to domain.com (and redirect all www.domain.com to that), the most value/strength/trust signal value comes from self-contained.
There ARE exceptions to this under very specific and narrow circumstances. For example, if you have an eCommerce site, and your blog is not focused on your products, but instead, is more informational in nature revolving around other topics (such as the manufacturing process in your industry, or how consumers use products (not just yours), etc.), having the blog on the main domain tree could potentially dilute the ecommerce value of the main site.
Again though, the need to get it "right" is just not worth the effort of splitting them out in most situations.
<colgroup><col width="605"></colgroup>
| http://uhealthsystem.com/doctors | -
Thanks for the quick reply...I have the book - and it certainly is meaty
!
I have been going about the way you describe (www.domain.com/blog) just wanted to get some re-affirmation after hearing from (what I think) is a reputable source that subdomain is better.
Everyone on board with this approach or does anyone have a strong argument against?
-
Technically, you're loosing a very very small amount of link juice by hosting it on a subdomain. The optimal configuration is www.domain.com/blog.
Source - SEO Secrets (great book by the way)
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
-
Forwarding a .org domain to a .com domain: any negative impact to consider?
Hello! I have a question I've been unable to find a clear answer to. My client's primary domain is a .com with a satisfactorily high DA. My client owns the .org version of its domain (which has a very low DA, I suppose due to inactivity) but has never forwarded it on. For branding/visibility/traffic reasons, I'd like to recommend they set up the .org domain to forward to the .com domain, but I wanted to ask a few questions first: 1. Does forwarding low-value DA domains to high-value DA domains have any negative authority/SEO impact? 2. If the .org domain was to be forwarded, am I correct that an SSL cert is not necessary for it if the .com domain has an SSL cert? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms1 -
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog.
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This was done with the purpose of gaining backlinks to our main website as well along with to our blog. This set us very low in organic traffic and not to mention, lost the backlinks. For anything, they are being redirected to 301 code. Kindly suggest changes to bring back all the traffic.
Technical SEO | | arun.negi0 -
Hosting images externally
In these days of CDNs does it matter for SEO whether images (and PDFs etc.) are hosted off-site? Does it make a difference if images hosted on Flickr, photobucket etc. Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Robots.txt on subdomains
Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
Technical SEO | | Whittie0 -
Best Way To Clean Up Unruly SubDomain?
Hi, I have several subdomains that present no real SEO value, but are being indexed. They don't earn any backlinks either. What's the best way of cleaning them up? I was thinking the following: 1. Verify them all in Webmaster Tools. 2. Remove all URLs from the index via the Removal Tool in WMT 3. Add site-wide no-index, follow directive. Also, to remove the URLs in WMT, you usually have to block the URLs via /robots.txt. If I'd like to keep Google crawling through the subdomains and remove their URLs, is there a way to do so?
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Keep the blog separate or incorporate into main domain?
So my organization currently has both a main site and on a separate domain and separate host a wordpress blog. (our own domain not a wordpress.com) the content posted on this blog is local, community driven, and related to our business but it is not used in anyway as a "sales" tool. It's more for interaction purposes with members and employees. This blog has a lot of content and is updated with new posts very often. (generate traffic from a pretty wide variety of searches some related some not) My plan has been to 301 the old domain and move the wordpress blog over to our root domain in a subdirectory such as oursite.com/blog. Does anyone have tips for moving a blog over like this? I'm concerned about any link juice it has dropping off and since it does provide some links to our root site currently (since it's basically a separate site). Basically i'm wondering if it'll be worth the effort or if i should just keep it separate and focus on other content gen strategies.
Technical SEO | | SCFederal0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0 -
How to move my blog from subdomain to subfolder?
Not an unusual situation, I have a blog on blog.domain.com it has quite a few blog postings. The platform is old and will be scrapped, but the blog content itself is going to be moved to domain.com/blog. The current process is we are manually listing all linked to/content pages and we are going to 301 redirect them to their counterparts on the new blog. This is going to be a tedious process. A) Is there any way to automate the moving of the blog? B) What is the best way to do the massive 301 redirect, php headers, .htaccess? Should we move the individual pages with redirects, or redirect the domain in the .htaccess (this will be very difficult to match all the titles and file structure)?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0