How should we setup of a side (slightly off-topic) blog?
-
Our web application targets small business owners and entrepreneurs. However, the developers at our company have a lot of great content to offer the web development community and so we want to start a "behind the scenes" blog where we can discuss technical topics... JavaScript performance, web accessibility, etc.
Our customers and the visitors of our website would probably not be interested this new content... So we want to be careful not to cannibalize or damage our current SEO.
What are some of the major risks we should watch out for? If we put it on a subdomain, is that enough to not impact our main site SEO or introduce keyword confusion?
Conversely, are there opportunities for this side blog to help the SEO and authority of our main website/domain?
Thanks for the help!
-
I don't think it will hurt rankings for your other important keywords, it will just increase the number of keywords that attract traffic. Links from development sites should help your overall keyword rankings. To me, it makes sense that developers would naturally link to a site that has created a web application.
SEOMoz appears to have taken the approach you suggested with their development blog: http://devblog.seomoz.org/
Other examples:
https://developer.apple.com/news/
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/
https://developer.amazon.com/blog/index.html
-
I'm not an expert here, so I'd wait for others to chime in before making a decision.
But I would imagine having a "Behind the scenes" category on your blog (and perhaps not showing it on the main blog index) would be the way to go. It is still relevant for your web application and some of the inbound links there may help you in future.
I think it's relevant enough to stay on the same domain, but perhaps I'm wrong.
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
-
Is this a Risky Blog Move?
I have a client who's thinking of placing their blog on a separate domain because the plug-ins and various other functionality is becoming bulky and slowing things down for the main site. There will be a 'Blog' link on the company's website navigation, just as there is now, that will take people to the blog. As an SEO person, this seems like a bad idea, even if we set up 301s from all the old posts to all the new ones. In my research I came across these two points: All backlinks to blog posts contribute directly to a website’s OVERALL SEO strength because those backlinks are pointing to your main domain. Removing them may reduce overall link juice to the site. Simply having fewer content pages on the site will cause entire site to rank lower because Google loves content-rich authority sites. Does anyone know this to be true for sure? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Caro-O
~Caro0 -
Weird Blog tags and re-directs
Hello fellow Digital Marketeers! As an in-house kinda guy, I rarely get to audit sites other than my own. But, I was tasked with auditing another. So I ran it through Screaming Frog and the usual tools. I got a couple of URLs come back with timeout messages, so I checked them manually- they're apparently part of a blog's archive: http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/tag/training-2/ I click 'read more' and it takes you to: http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/pfi-contracts-3-myth-busters-to-help-achieve-savings/ The first URL seems entirely redundant. Has anyone else seen something like this? Just an explanation as to why something like that would exist, and how you'd handle that would be grand! Much appreciated, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Blog Comments & nofollow to follow backlink ratio
Hello I have a website with 2000 nofollow links backlinks and about 20 follow links. It is currently ranking 11<sup>th</sup> on Google. The websites that are outranking it have lower ranking stats and in some cases only 2 follow links. Most of the nofollow links are blog comments, could this be what is dragging down my stats. The only factor my website is worst on is the number of server requests per load, which is 194 as it is a theme. Blog comments can be very difficult to remove; I created these several years ago before I knew too much about SEO. Most of them are on other websites in same niche. Would I be best to ask website owners to delete my comments or restart on a new domain. Thanks Rob
Technical SEO | | tomfifteen0 -
How to add specific Tumblr blogs into a disavow file?
Hi guys, I am about to send a reconsideration letter and still finalizing my disavow file. The format of the disavow is Domain:badlink.com (stripping out to the root domain) but what about those toxic links that are located in tumblr such as: badlink.tumblr.com? The issue is that there are good tumblr links we got so I don't want to add just tumblr.com so do you guys think I will have issues submitting badlink.tumblr.com and not tumblr.com? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Blog RSS behind https
Hi, I'm finding our blog's RSS feed won't be recognized by various websites. The feed is on a https url. Is this the most likely problem? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Noindex, nofollow on a blog since 2009
Just reviewed a WordPress blog that was launched in 2009 but somehow the privacy setting was to not index it, so all this time there's been a noindex, nofollow meta tag in the header. The client couldn't figure out why masses of content wasn't showing up in search results. I've fixed the setting and assume Google will spider in short order; the blog is a subdirectory of their main site. My question is whether there is anything else I can or should do. Can Google recognize the age of the content, or that it once had a noindex meta tag? Will it "date" the blog as of today? Has the client lost out on untold benefits from the long history of content creation? I imagine that link juice from any backlinks to the blog will now flow back to the main site; think that's true? Just curious what others might think of this scenario and whether any other action is warranted.
Technical SEO | | vickim0 -
Setup 301 Redirects
I have been asked to transfer a clients old domain over to a new domain with a new site. All of the inbound links basically go to the homepage, and the few links that dont go to the homepage on the old site, might as well be redirected to the homepage on the new site. I'm wondering is there a "catch all" sort of redirect such as www.oldsite.com/* redirects to newsite.com. So any redirects we havent set up will automatically go to the new site homepage? And secondly, whats the easiest way to the redirects up? Can I just add it as a parked domain or addon domain in cpanel, and do the redirects in there? Or does it needs its own hosting for the old domain with its own htaccess file? Any help appreciated! 🙂
Technical SEO | | timscullin0 -
What are the SEO related negative aspects of having a blog on a subdomain?
Just double checking this one. Is it less than ideal to have a blog on a subdomain rather than as a sub folder on a domain?
Technical SEO | | PerchDigital0