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.
Moving blog to a subdomain, how can I help it rank?
-
Hi all,
We recently moved our blog to a sub-domain where it is hosted on Wordpress. It was very recent and we're actively working on the SEO, but any pointers on getting the subdomain to rank higher than the old blog posts would be terrific.
Thanks!
-
That's great, thanks for the info! Do you know of any resources off-hand about "generally not [listing] more than two of these subdomains in the search results" for more detail?
-
You can use PHP redirects, and they'll do the same thing. Though it will be a little slower and the page still has to technically exist. If it's a very high traffic site, then it may eventually become an issue.
-
My long-term is to get it into a folder, but in the meantime I've had to do a subdomain. Just wondering if I can specifically make the subdomain rank higher than the old (previous) folder URL.
-
Going to a folder would be great, but the reason was due to the way the CMS works and a few other things. I know it's not the most popular way, but it's a dramatic improvement so far.
-
We haven't lost any traffic yet, I've been pretty cautious and we've actually had a huge improvement in some areas. I'm can't really share all of the reasoning behind it, but I appreciate the note about potentially losing traffic. I had a suspicion about the redirect though, if I can't change the htaccess, would PHP or similar redirects do anything?
-
I would like to have done it as a folder, but that wasn't feasible at the time. I have some limitations in terms of the CMS that our corporate site is hosted.
-
Sure, but the subdomain/folder debate has been going back and forth for years. And I wonder if it's not so much a question of where, but a question of a bunch of new URLs. Would that possibly make a search engine reconsider the pages?
We know Google and Bing have stupid amounts of computing power. Duane Forrester has said that a Bing server farm causes so much heat, that they have to contact the FAA when they vent the facility. It causes turbulence.
We already know that no search engine can crawl the entire web at this point. So, it may be reasonable to think that some pages are just rated and possibly semi-forgotten. Once a page gets a new URL, it may look like a new thing. The algorithm has changed. New results populate. That may be the case.
Or there could actually be a genuine human preference, though my mom doesn't pay much attention to the URL.
This stuff is quite difficult to discern with complete certainty. It's basically physics. When you contact the search engines, they contact you back. Now, those contacts are happening billions of times a day.
For now, I will remain agnostic. Sub domain, or sub folder are equally fine until proven otherwise with proof beyond a few tests.
-
Right on, David. That's what I'm referring to Travis. Rand also mentioned this recently in a WBF.
-
From search engine journal:
"For blogs, I prefer a subfolder (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/) because the link juice which is sent to that blog is going to be naturally distributed to that main domain, and other subfolders under the domain.
Futhermore, the forum/blog will default logo, home page and other links back to the subfolder. If you set this up with a subdomain, by default, the links in the forum/blog itself will all point back to the subdomain. So, with a subfolder, both the inbound and internal linking structure favor the entire site.
With a subdomain, the forum or blog will be listed as a separate entity in the Google search results, which is good for owning the results and one’s reputation management. However, Google and other engines will generally not list more than two of these subdomains in the search results, unless those subdomains can prove to Google that they are independent and relevant entities."
If you don't know htaccess, redirecting the site to and from the subdomain can be a nightmare. If not setup correctly, your subdomain can cause you all types of duplication and strange URL complications.
Hope this helps!
-
Funny, we made that last few month - but the different way - from a subdomain to a folder. We directed older to newer posts, cleaned the code, speed up, made it responsive and moved it to the folder.
If you want to have great SEO effects with a blog you need it on the sub-folder like RickyShockley said bevore.
-
A sub domain is no better than a folder and vice versa. I'm more curious what brought about this decision. So if you know of an interesting argument, I would like to hear it.
Now, what you may need to do, unless all the external links to the pages are terrible, is setup 301 redirects. How to do that would really depend upon your server. The vast majority are Linux based. So you would have to search something like '301 redirect htaccess (server flavor)'. That could be Apache, Nginx, CentOS... whatever. Either way, you'll get there, and if it's still a question then there are plenty of forums that specialize in your server type.
Beware of htaccess. It will knock your site down if you mess up the configuration via white space or some other syntax error. Try it in a test environment first, if possible. 'Always look both ways before crossing the street.' That is how you handle htaccess.
I don't want to startle you, but right now you're possibly losing a ton of traffic. Maybe you aren't losing any at all. I don't know, I don't know your domain. I can't even begin to guess.
Refer to your analytics and redirect if it's worthwhile. That's all I can say without knowing more.
-
I know that rand recommends hosting your blog on a FOLDER of your root domain instead of hosting your blog on a subdomain.
The reason for doing so is that the domain authority of the subdomain will put a slightly larger distance (in terms of authority signals carrying over) from the root.
For example, its better to have your blog at bobsmithdental.com/blog vs blog.bobsmithdental.com.
After that, its really a matter of tightening up your keyword optimization on the blog posts and building and earning quality inbound links!
-Ricky
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
-
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Domain Authority: 23, Page Authority: 33, Can My Site Still Rank?
Greetings: Our New York City commercial real estate site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Key MOZ metric are as follows: Domain Authority: 23
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Page Authority: 33
28 Root Domains linking to the site
179 Total Links. In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics. Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future? Ideas?
Thanks, Alan Rosinsky0 -
Subdomain Blog Sitemap link - Add it to regular domain?
Example of setup:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE3
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com). I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap. 1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol? 2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer. 3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap. Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done. Thanks!0 -
Duplicate content on subdomains.
Hi Mozer's, I have a site www.xyz.com and also geo targeted sub domains www.uk.xyz.com, www.india.xyz.com and so on. All the sub domains have the content which is same as the content on the main domain that is www.xyz.com. So, I want to know how can i avoid content duplication. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0