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
-
I have redirected my old domain to my new blog, why its not being detected?
Hey Experts, I hope you are all doing great, I'm extremely confused right now. Any help will be much appreciated. I have redirected my old blog hellgatelondon.com to my new blog iriveramerica.com. It has been redirected for many days with wild card from bluehost and also within htaccess but Moz link explorer won't detect it, what's the problem? anyone please? Kind regards...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | euaobela0 -
Good to Internal Link from Old Blog Posts?
I am working on a site which has good amount of content pages & blogposts. All blog posts & content pages have been indexed in google already since a long time. Will this be a good practice if I internally link to new pages from old pages or a few important pages from those old indexed content pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
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 -
Client has blog and main site - current thoughts - how to consolidate?
So I have several clients who have been blogging for a few years on Blogger and self hosted WordPress. They also have their "main site" on a different URL. What is the current thinking on what to do with the content. The "main sites" could use a bit of a boost and I know the content would help so I know I can 3-1 redirect everything from the current blogs to a new home on the main site. What I am thinking is to move most of the posts to the main site with redirects, but leave a few posts around perhaps a theme (and maybe writing a few more) and leaving that property up and "open for business" so the links from it have some value to the main site, we can get G-plus author attribution on several sites in their topic of experience and maybe we can get some extra pages to rank in top 7. Does this seem like a reasonable strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dot-B-dot-B0 -
Article/ Blog Post submissions
Hello All, I'm looking to perform a 'Standard' guest blog post link building tactic, but i'm a little unsure as where to start. Does anybody have a list/ guide to websites that accept guest posts? Preferably ones that are useful for SEO purposes, I have been link building for about 3 months now, but to be honest, most of these links are NoFollow, which isn't too great! Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Odd Results Moving Subdomain Content onto Main Domain
Hi forum! On Thursday night (12/6/12) we moved a page (and all the linking product pages) from our subdomain, mailing-list.consumerbase.com, to our main domain, www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists.html Shockingly, today I search for "mailing lists" (our #1 target keyword) and we're on the first page! This page never has not ranked well for this keyword in the past. The problem is, the link displaying on Google is our old mailing-list.consumerbase.com subdomain URL. Did moving this content from the new subdomain to our old, well-established domain cause it to appear better in search? Or, since the URL is on the subdomain, did Google just finally get around to indexing that page? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0