Blog on Subdomain or Subdirectory?
-
I was wondering what the SEO impact was of having a blog on a sub domain or sub directory.
Which of the following is better?
Personally, I like making the blog a more important part of the site so 2) is preferable; however, I don't know which one is best for SEO purposes. Do the search engines consider a subdomain as a different website? Can SEO authority be passed through each equally?
What is your preference?
Regards, Dino
-
You're very welcome. I'm glad I could help
-
That is what I thought as well. Thank you for taking the time to answer.
Regards, Dino
-
Hi Dino,
The consensus in the SEO community is that search engines still identify subdomains as separate sites (with respect to how domain authority is calculated and distributed throughout the Web graph).
Therefore, the second option (i.e., companysite.com/blog) is much better from an SEO perspective because it consolidates all of the website's content under a single site and maximizes the flow of authority through that site.
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
-
Internally linked pages from different subdomain must be well optimised?
Hi all, We have guide/help pages from different subdomain (help.website.com). And we have linked these from 3rd hierarchy level pages of our website (website.com/folder1/topic2). But help.website sumdomain & pages are not well optimised. So, I am not sure linking these subdomain pages from our website pages hurts our rankings? Thanks,
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
What to do with blog pagination / categories
On our new website we are going to have a blog that is custom built. However, you can browse the general blog with pagination. You can also nest into the categories or by month. Doing each will have a different link: Category: www.mywebsite.com/blog/web-guides/Month: www.mywebsite.com/blog/2014/january/ My question is what is the best thing to do with these pages. Rel Canonical them to the blog home? Or nofollow/noindex them? Will Google not see these as duplicate content pages?
Web Design | | vortexuk0 -
Learning Center on Subdomain or New Domain
Hello, With so much emphasis for SEO to develop unique, information content I am working to build out a "Learning Center' for one of my clients in the finance industry. As you can guess, this is quite a competitive space and their rankings have become somewhat stagnant so we are looking for new ways to develop original, share-worthy content for the site. So my question is, in order for them to retain the most SEO value should we develop this on a subdomain such as learning.website.com or a new domain altogether. Note: We do not want to develop this under the current site domain as it we want o only post informational content & courses and keep these pieces outside of the "sales" side of their website. Therefore, I thought the subdomain would be the best bet so that we would retain the most value for SEO... however, some of my colleagues disagree. Some vote it should be within a directory under website.com. Some say a new site & domain altogether. My vote is to place this under a subdomain such as http://learning.website.com with the idea that the site's authority will influence the root http://website.com. The argument I was provided against the subdomain was: "essentially adding a subdomain would mean you're sort of starting over again in terms of building authority. adding a folder will ride the coattails off the already established authority." Lastly, for clarification, the current domain is set up as http://website.com so the subdomain would be http://learning.website.com, the directory would be set up as http://website.com/learning/ and a whole new domain would be http://newwebsite.com. This is for a Wordpress site. Thoughts? All feedback is much appreciated!
Web Design | | TinaMumm0 -
Is there any negative SEO effect when using Wordpress for your Blog?
I have a site entirely done in html, no CMS used. The blog page however, is wordpress. Wondering if this will effect us negatively in terms of SEO, having the blog that is linked to our site, a wordpress site. My gut is absolutely not, but the questions was asked....what do you think?
Web Design | | cschwartzel0 -
Wordpress Blog Providing SEO to Main Site
Hi, I recently started a very much "learn on the job" SEO position, transitioning from a copywriting background. We currently have a wordpress blog up and running (and producing some decent quality content too I hope!) at example.com/blog/ and a sign up page located at example.com (sorry, can't put the address right now) for a site that is being custom built as it's got some nifty software linking to back end systems. My question is whether the content on the blog will bring SEO benefits to the main domain or whether it'll just be for the blog itself? If the latter, should we navigate the blog onto the a separate page of the main site? Thanks so much! I'm learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but somethings still get me in a little bit of a tizzy.
Web Design | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Is it OK to 301 Redirect http://homepage.com to http://blog.homepage.com?
I don't have a homepage built yet, and I suspect that my blog will be my primary SEO draw in the long term, so I'd like to do a 301 redirect (for the techies, I'm doing it in Django with http.HttpResponsePermanentRedirect ) I just wanted to confirm that this wouldn't cause any problems as Google gets used to my page (it's only been up for a few days) Thanks! -matt
Web Design | | 49wetnoodles0 -
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)
Web Design | | brianmcc0 -
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