Should I move my blog from subdomain to subdirectory?
-
Hi there,
We have a pretty strong organic presence on our consumer facing blog. Around 5.7 million organic clicks Year to Date. It's currently housed in Wordpress on a subdomain.
Our team is considering migrating our blog from Wordpress to Sitecore, where our parent organization resides. With that consideration, we're trying to determine if we should preserve the subdomain or move to a subdirectory of the parent brand. Moving to the parent brand would also result in a loss of our custom global nav - we would inherit the global nav of the parent website.
We're not concerned about traffic loss risk - we know that we'll lose some but we think the move to subdirectory might be more beneficial in the long run from an SEO perspective. We're mostly concerned about the users getting lost without the global nav specific to the blog.
Thoughts/concerns?
Thank you!
-
Google is good at understanding the relationship between sub/primaries via linking and etc. and some of the issues may be more of server response time for the sub and etc.
I agree w/Ross--I prefer directories. However, if the structure has been around a while and migration is difficult, I don't see a huge benefit in migrating. Also, I believe there are some ways to use .htaccess that you can rewrite a subdomain to the directory.
See this video from Google's John Mueller for more information.
-
Hi there,
You should move your blog from the subdomain to a folder on your root domain. For example blog.website.com -> website.com/blog. Since Google treats all subdomains as separate entities or sites you are partially losing SEO equity because it is getting distributed between subdomain and root domain.
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
-
Referring subdirectory pages from 3rd hierarchy level pages. Will this hurts?
Hi all, We have product feature pages at 3rd tier like website.com/product/features. We have the help guides for each of these features on a different subdirectory like website.com/help/guides. We are linking these help guides from every page of features. So, will it hurts us anywhere just because we are encouraging 4th tier pages in website, moreover they are from different sub-directory. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Moving youtube videos between accounts/channels
Hi.
Web Design | | corn2015
If you have a youtube channel that has a lot of videos on it and need to move the videos to another channel, is there an easy method to do this without having to download and re-upload them?0 -
Does moving Server (IP) affect rankings?
I work for a pretty large company with an established web domain with thousands of pages. We are working on a new website and they talked about moving the site onto a new server. What is the impact ranking wise of going to a new server? Does Google care so long as it's the same domain, or is there some equity lost? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | ScottOlson0 -
Our on page blog is off page! What?
Hi Moz Community, I have a customer who has a blog that is FULL of great unique content however the blog resides at a URL that differs from the main site. Eg. blog.mywebsite.com Instead of www.mywebsite.com/blog . With the latest Google updates I fear that this may be hurting our web ranking. In addition the web blog is a carbon copy of the main URL. My Question: I am going to schedule a meeting with the web designers, How vociferously should I argue for having them move the blog onsite and write 301 redirects for the current blog site?
Web Design | | CKerr0 -
Content Migration & cost of moving pages
Hope you are all having a great day! I am wondering if anyone would be able to provide general feedback. I work for a medium size company in Chicago. Currently our site is static html and we are seeking to migrate to Wordpress. After speaking with a number of website companies and receiving proposals, I am trying to understand if there is an approximate going rate or range for moving content from static html to a CMS like Wordpress? i.e. a cost per page? We don't have any dynamic content. Most of our pages are text and images. The site itself, including the blog is around 220 pages. Thanks in advance for any insight or resources!
Web Design | | SEOSponge0 -
Subdomain pdfs - do you track them?
We've enabled event tracking to monitor clicks to pdfs on our website. All of these pdfs are hosted in a subdomain. The thing is, we offer some valuable pdfs that get a lot of traffic from search engines but I can't track them on Google Analytics. Do you track such pdfs? I can't place tracking code as they are pdfs on a subdomain. Thoughts?
Web Design | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Subdomains For Real Estate Website
I am currently working on a proposal for a clients Wordpress website development which includes ongoing SEO after the website is developed. I have looked into a number of options and the one that seems the most cost effective involves using subdomains for the individual listings pages. What I want: clientsdomain.com/listings/idxnumber/ What I can get for a decent price: listings.clientsdomain.com/idxnumber/ So the majority of the website will actually exist on a subdomain because the IDX API will automatically populate pages for all of the MLS listings in the area (hundreds or thousands). Meanwhile the domain itself will have all the neighborhood pages and other optimized content, blogs and whatnot. My concern is that dividing the website like this will have negative effects on SEO. There wont be duplicate content across subdomain and main domain, but they will share a lot of links back and forth. I haven't found any recent sources on the topic. Almost everything I have found says that dividing a website in this manor is bad for SEO, but these articles are often many years old. Does anyone know of a Wordpress plugin/IDX company that can provide a solution that doesn't use a subdomain and actually just lists each MLS page within a directory? I am open to using another platform, I am just most familiar with Wordpress. Will using a subdomain in the ways mentioned above have a profound negative effect on SEO? Thank you for your time in responding, I greatly appreciate it.
Web Design | | TotalMarketExposure0 -
Blog via iframe or not?
We had our developers install Wordpress in the www.ourmainsite.com/blog directory. Our site is .NET based. Now we asked them to customize the blog's appearance to look like our main site. Here is the proposal from our developers to avoid lots of PHP coding: "In this approach we will create a custom page which will contain an iFrame in the body section. This iFrame will be solely responsible for showing all the blog pages. The template for Blog Pages will be designed in php (except the Header and Footer section). In Short, We will run the wordpress site (Blog) in our [main] Site" My Questions 1. Do the URLs have to stay the same for every page on the blog when using an iframe? (we want unique URLs for every page/post) 2. What are the SEO implications of this method? Will internal linking in the blog help pass all of the link juice throughout the main site and the blog? 3. How difficult is it to match the header, footer, and CSS (font/style/colors) of our main site in the Wordpress installation given that the site is .Net and Wordpress is PHP? Does spending some more time/money now to build everything in PHP without an iframe make sense in the long run? Thanks!
Web Design | | pbhatt0