Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Move blog from subdomain to main domain on ecom site?
-
I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision.
Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts.
This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc.
Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?
-
I am glad I was able to help and I am sure you'll do great with the long tails especially if the niche is not highly competitive. Hit me up in a few months would love to hear you did well.
-
Mik,
I agree with everything you said. My plan is to move it to a subfolder and redirect everything. I appreciate the example of the long tail traffic example.
Someone told the owner of the site to put it on a subdomain for seo and there are very few instances where I could see that as being the way to go.
-
Moving it in a sub folder in your main site will be more beneficial . Speaking from experience we've seen the sites we've worked with gain a relevant amount of long tail traffic when we implemented this strategy.
Subdomains DO NOT always inherit all of the positive metrics and ranking ability of other subdomains on a given root domain. If a major motivation of the blog is to pass juice then definitely build it in a sub folder.
I forget the link to the study but Post-Panda some webmasters actually resorted to moving content to subdomains as a work around to their content woes providing further proof that sub domains provide a buffer from negative or positive metrics of the root domain.
In summation I really feel it is the intent of the blog that you should consider when making this determination but in your situation I would suggest following your current direction , More info here for further reading .
Hope this helps ... Cheers Mate
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
-
Why some domains and sub-domains have same DA, but some others don't?
Hi I noticed for some blog providers in my country, which provide a sub-domian address for their blogs. the sub-domain authority is exactly as the main domain. Whereas, for some other blog providers every subdomain has its different and lower authority. for example "ffff.blog.ir" and "blog.ir" both have domain authority of 60. It noteworthy to mention that the "ffff.blog.ir" does not even exist! This is while mihanblog.com and hfilm.mihanblog.com has diffrent page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayatarh5451230 -
Combining Two Sites With Similar Domain Authority
Hello, We run two sites with the same product, product descriptions and url structure. Essentially, the two sites are the same except for domain name and minor differences on the home pages. We've run this way for quite a few years. Both sites have a domain authority of 48 and there are not a large number of duplicate incoming links. I understand the "book" to say we should combine the sites with 301's to the similar pages. I am concerned about doing this because "site 2" still does about 20% of our business. We have been losing organic traffic for a number of years. I think this mainly has to do with a more competitive environment. However, where google used to serve both our sites for a search term it now will only show one. How much organic benefit should we see if we combine. Will it be significant enough to merge the two sites. Understandably, I realize the future can't be predicted but I would like to know if anyone has had a similar experience or opinion Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ffctas0 -
Two blogs on a single domain?
Hi guys, Does anyone have any experience of having (trying to rank) two separate blogs existing on one domain, for instance: www.companysite.com/service1/blogwww.companysite.com/service2/blogThese 2 pages (service 1 and service 2) offer completely different services (rank for different keywords).(for example, a company that provides 2 separate services: SEO service and IT service)Do you think it is a good/bad/confusing search engine practice trying to have separate blogs for each service or do you think there should be only one blog that contains content for both services?Bearing in mind that there is an already existing subdomain for a non-profit part of business that ranks for different keywords: non-profit.companysite.comand it will potentially have another blog so the URL would look like: non-profit.companysite.com/blogAny ideas would be appreciated!Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellys.marketing0 -
Franchise sites: Should each franchise have a subdomain or subdirectory?
One of my clients has about 40 franchisees who are going to have their own sites on a WordPress multisite installation. The question they're wondering: should these be on subdirectories (thesite.com/this-franchise) or on subdomains (this-franchise.thesite.com)? Which is best for SEO? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ideasandpixels0 -
Unique domains vs. single domain for UGC sites?
Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intentionally0 -
How to properly link network of microsites and main sites?
Law firm has a main brand site (lawfirmname.com) with lots of content focusing on personal injury related areas of law. They also do other unrelated areas of law such as bankruptcy and divorce. They have a separate website for bankruptcy and a separate one for divorce. These websites have good quality content, a backlinking campaign, and are fairly large websites, with landing pages for different cities. They also have created local microsites in the areas of bankruptcy and divorce that target specific smaller cities that the main bankruptcy site and divorce site do not target well. These microsites have a good deal of original content and the content is mostly specific to the city the website is about, and virtually no backlinks. There are about 15 microsites for cities in bankruptcy and 10 in divorce and they rank pretty well for these city specific local searches. None of these sites are linked at all, and all 28 of the sites are under the same hosting account (all are subdomains of root domain of hosting account). Question, should I link these sites together at all and if so how? I considered making a simple and general page on the lawfirmname.com personal injury site for bankruptcy and divorce (lawfirmname.com/bankruptcy and lawfirmname.com/divorce) and then saying on the page something to the effect of "for more information on bankruptcy go to our main bankruptcy site at ....." and putting the link to the main bankruptcy site. Same for divorce. This way users can go to lawfirmname.com site and find Other Practice Areas, go to bankruptcy page, and link to main bankruptcy site. Is this the best way to link to these two main sites for bankruptcy and divorce or should I be linking upward? Secondly, should I link the city specific microsites to any of the other sites or leave them completely separate? Thirdly, should all of these sites be hosted on the same account or is this something that should be changed? I was considering not linking the city specific sites at all, but if I did this I didn't know if I should create different hosting accounts for them (which could be expensive). The sites work well in themselves without being linked, but wanted to try to network them in some way if possible without getting penalized or causing any issues with the search engines. Any help would be appreciated on how to network and host all of these websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | broca777110 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
Redirect posts from a wordpress.com blog over to a self-hosted blog
Hi All I started a wordpress.com blog with a few posts on it, and these have been shared using social media so links to these exist on Facebook and Twitter. I've decided that its going to be better and more effective to have the blog on my primary domain. How would I setup a redirect from the wordpress.com blog to my self hosted blog? Normally I'd write a .htaccess file but I'm unable to do that over at wordpress.com. I can't even see an option to install plugins, otherwise I would have used the "Redirector" plugin.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blacey0