SEO advice with having a blog on sub domain.
-
Righto, so:
I've been working on our company website www.nursesfornurses.com.au which is built on .asp which is a real pain because the site is built so messy and on a very dated CMS which means I have to go back to the dev every time I want to make a change.
We've made the decision to move the site over to Wordpress in stages. So, (and I hope logically), i've started by making them a proper blog with better architecture to start targeting industry related keywords.
I had to put it on a sub domain as the current hosting does not support Wordpress http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/
The previous blog is here: http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blogIts not live yet, so I'm just looking for SEO advice or issues I might encounter by having the blog on a sub domain. In terms of user experience, I realise that there needs a clearer link back to the main website, I'm just trying to work out the best way to do it...
Any advice / criticism is greatly welcomed.
Thanks
-
So If i move the content of the current blog:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blogTo my subdomain:
http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/Should I be expecting to see a decrease in rankings, even if I do 301 redirects from all the blog posts to the new ones..?
I'm just trying to get this as black and white as possible for my directors.
-
If you are looking for the fastest way to do this, just clone and backup your existing WP site and database, then move to your test environment and start building your new site there. That way you will already have all of your old blog posts in place, and save a ton of time, especially if the blog has been styled to look like the main URL.
For the blog, I agree with others in stating you should keep it as part of your main website. Doesnt make sense to have it on a subdomain unless you have to, like your old ASP configuration.
-
I noticed in the Matt Cutts article that: news.google.com would be suitable on a sub domain, so perhaps this will apply...?
we've added a fair amount of content which was previously in the members area so in some ways this is a separate entity
If I setup 301 redirects on all the blog pages pages would this pass the page authority to the new blog pages?
-
Thanks for your responses, and I agree that we need to move host but its a pretty big thing to do and in our current situation it will take months to redevelop the site completely to Wordpress so we really have to do it in stages.
I did notice in the Matt Cutts article that: news.google.com would be suitable on a sub domain, so perhaps this will apply, also we've added a fair amount of content which was previously in the members area.
If I setup 301 redirects on these pages would this not pass the page authority to the new blog?
Thanks for your responses, this situation is looking tricker than ever!!
-
Stelios gives the technical details. Now for the encouragement....
For all of the work that you can put into a website, you owe it to yourself to ditch a host, a CMS, an SEO, a developer, a technology or anything else that forces you to run a blog on a subdomain.
-
Hello,
Thanks for your question. My advice is to keep your blog on your main domain, not separate it to be a subdomain.
The reason for this is a subdomain is it's own separate entity and you won't get the benefit of the authority that's part of your main domain, and blog posts should be relevant to a service and internal link to them. For example, how this post links to the Nurse CPD page (except I'd use Nurse CPD has the anchor text, not the brand name in this case).
Matt Cutts wrote about this in 2007, and I think the information is still valid. In his post, he stated that his preferred use of a subdomain was to separate out information that is completely different. For example, if you had a staff portal, this could sit on a subdomain as it's purpose would than the information on your main website.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Sub-Domain or Folder. Which is better for SEO.?
Hey all. I just need clarification that which one is better to use for big property or travel portal. Check below example: I have a website which runs for multiple location like india, uk, canada, uae. For every location the content is different. So my question is that for better SEO results should i use india.xyz.com or **xyz.com/india/ **. One more example **canada.xyz.com **or xyz.com/canada/ Can anyone please suggest which one is better. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PFX1110 -
Combine .com and .co.uk domain? So forward .co.uk to .com for SEO?
Hello, A new client of mine has an .com and an .co.uk domain. Both the same content (and they don't have the capacity to make specific content on both domains). I am thinking building al domain authority to 1 domain. In this case the .com domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
And forward the .co.uk to this .com domain.
In this way, the .com will rank in both UK as in other English speaking countries, right? Or not?
Or should I use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag? I am not sure. But I do know big brands rank high in the Netherlands with .com domains (for example booking.com). Looking forward on feedback on best practices here... Thanks!0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
Move webshop domain to the brand domain?
Hello, A client of mine has a brand with a website for over 10 years now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
About 4 years ago the have opened a webshop on an other domain (like www.brandnamewebshop.com). At this moment the brand domain has a seomoz authority of 45.
The webshop domain authority is 25. The question:
Would it not be better to transfer the webshop to the brand domain because of the domain authority? If so, how can this be done the best way? With a 301?
I also think: what a loss of energy of building the authority on the other domain.
Is it an idea to use both domains for a webshop and rewrite the content? Or is there an other way to still make use of the built up domain authority? Would it really help the other domain when I make a 301 redirect (and make use of the pointing links to the webshop domain?). I hope somebody have some experience with this...
Looking forward to the possibilities! Gerjan0 -
Multiple domain level redirects to unique sub-folder on one domain...
Hi, I have a restaurant menu directory listing website (for example www.menus.com). Restaurant can have there menu listed on this site along with other details such as opening hours, photos ect. An example of a restaurant url might be www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza. A feature i would like to offer is the ability for Bob's pizza to use the menus.com website listing as his own website (let assume he has no website currently). I would like to purchase www.bobspizza.com and 301 redirect to www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrails
So bob can then list bobspizza.com on his advertising material (business cards etc, rather than www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza). I was considering using a 301 redirect for this though have been told that too many domain level redirects to one single domain can be flagged as spam by Google. Is there any other way to achieve this outcome without being penalised? Rel canonical url, url masking? Other things to note: It is fine if www.bobspizza.com is NOT listed in search results. I would ideally like any link juice pointing to www.bobspizza.com to pass onto www.menus.com though this is a nice to have. If it comes at the cost of being penalised i can live without the link juice from this. Thanks0 -
SEO Recommendations
For about 3 years our website was number one in Google.co.uk for our trades main keyphrase which resulted in excellent sales. About 12 months ago that position started to slide downwards and for that keyphrase we are now number 10. We are still at number's 1,2 and 3 for several other keyphrases but ones that result in fewer daily Google searches and resultant sales. I have always added unique content to the site but admit that my blog posts became less than daily over the past 12 months. However I am adding posts as often as I can now, of good length and of unique content. As well as tweaking all our online seo factors I'm trying to add good backlinks as often as possible. I wonder if anyone has been in a similar position and what they did to try and regain their previous position? Colin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises0 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0 -
Domains merging
Hi everyone, The company I work for has two domains, one for the english version of the website and another one for the french version. Example: www.digitalmusic.com (in english) www.musiquedigitale.com (in french) (these are examples***) I would like to know if on SEO standpoint it would be better to only have one domain so all of the links link to the same domain. Would it increase the domain authority and our rankings ? We will then have: www.digitalmusic.com/fr/page1 for pages in french www.digitalmusic.com/en/page1 for pages in english with all the 301 redirects required... Thank you in advance for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxxum0