Off-site company blog linking to company site or blog incorporated into the company site?
-
Kind of a SEO newbie, so be gentle. I'm a beginner content strategist at a small design firm. Currently, I'm working with a client on a website redesign. Their current website is a single page dud with a page authority of 5. The client has a word press blog with a solid URL name, a domain authority of 100 and page authority of 30. My question is this: would it be better for my client from an SEO perspective to:
- Re-skin their existing blog and link to the new company website with it, hopefully passing on some of its "Google Juice,"or...
- Create a new blog on their new website (and maybe do a 301 redirect from the old blog)?
- Or are there better options that I'm not thinking of?
Thanks for whatever help you can give a newbie. I just want to take good care of my client.
-
Thanks very much to all you for your thoughts. Very helpful indeed.
-
This is a great response an I love the advice about "over-thinking". Well said. Move on.
There are a great deal of wordpress self hosting options and themes out there should you chose to stay with wordpress. We chose Genesis from Studiopress and have been very satisfied. But there are many other great choices.
Best!
-
I would put the blog on the domain of the company.
Since the blog is on Wordpress.com, I would just move it even if it has little traffic. The PA 30 is generic wordpress.com blog PA. Nothing really important with that. Keeps things simple and you'll have more freedom. Overthinking this will just make things harder and since you are new, itll just make your learning curve longer.
Tell them what to do, don't give them options and hope they aren't sentimental for a wordpress.com blog. Move on and market their site. Boom!
-
If your clients DA is 100, it's probably hosted on a Wordpress subdomain (http://clientblog.wordpress.com/), right?
I would incorporate that blog into their existing site on their domain and work with WP to redirect if at all possible. In terms of theory, this is pretty easy to think about. Simply ask yourself (or your client)...
"If a potential customer is taking the time to read this piece of content you took X minutes/hours/days to write, where would you prefer they read it? On Wordpress.com, where they can easily find content on the same subject from 1000s of other writers? Or on your site, where they can learn more about only YOU and YOUR business?"
If they can't wrap their head around the virtual aspects of Wordpress.com vs. their own domain, give them a real world analogy.
- Compare Wordpress.com to them having a pop-up stand at a tradeshow for anything and everything available for sale in the world, then
- Compare their own domain to their physical brick and mortar store.
Where would they rather the potential customer engage with their brand? I think we can all come to an agreement on what the right choice is for that one.
I'm not saying it's a BAD IDEA to have a blog on Wordpress.com, but the content they write should probably be generalized about their industry and offer links back to their services where applicable. Their company-centric news and top content for generating traffic via SEO/inbound marketing should be hosted on their own domain.
Hope this helps.
-
We went through the same thought process and decided to self host a wordpress site and dump the wordpress.com (in our case) blog. There are many advantages of having the blog on your own site. You will be increasing the number of pages and adding fresh content. Google likes that and you can compete for more keywords. Also creating content in your blog that other people will link to because it is high quality will get you links naturally. I don't think it can be overstated as to how important this can be for SEO.
I can't really speak to whether or not the 301 is a good idea. In our case it wasn't possible anyway.
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
-
Unsolved URL dynamic structure issue for new global site where I will redirect multiple well-working sites.
Dear all, We are working on a new platform called [https://www.piktalent.com](link url), were basically we aim to redirect many smaller sites we have with quite a lot of SEO traffic related to internships. Our previous sites are some like www.spain-internship.com, www.europe-internship.com and other similars we have (around 9). Our idea is to smoothly redirect a bit by a bit many of the sites to this new platform which is a custom made site in python and node, much more scalable and willing to develop app, etc etc etc...to become a bigger platform. For the new site, we decided to create 3 areas for the main content: piktalent.com/opportunities (all the vacancies) , piktalent.com/internships and piktalent.com/jobs so we can categorize the different types of pages and things we have and under opportunities we have all the vacancies. The problem comes with the site when we generate the diferent static landings and dynamic searches. We have static landing pages generated like www.piktalent.com/internships/madrid but dynamically it also generates www.piktalent.com/opportunities?search=madrid. Also, most of the searches will generate that type of urls, not following the structure of Domain name / type of vacancy/ city / name of the vacancy following the dynamic search structure. I have been thinking 2 potential solutions for this, either applying canonicals, or adding the suffix in webmasters as non index.... but... What do you think is the right approach for this? I am worried about potential duplicate content and conflicts between static content dynamic one. My CTO insists that the dynamic has to be like that but.... I am not 100% sure. Someone can provide input on this? Is there a way to block the dynamic urls generated? Someone with a similar experience? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Jose_jimenez0 -
We are migrating a site and are seeing alot of 301s and 302s already in the old site is it ok to leave those as is?
For the 3xx’s I’m not sure if it’s okay for us to redirect to these so please advise on that
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
Mobile site content and main site content
Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried. I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Confused on footer links (Which are best practices for footer links on other websites?)
Hello folks, We are eCommerce web design and Development Company and we give do follow links of our website to every projects which we have done with specific keywords. So now the concern is we are seeing huge amount of back-links are being generated from single root domain for particular keyword in webmaster tools. So what should be the best way to practice this? Should we give no follow attribute to it or can use our company logo with link? LtMjHER.png
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Has anyone used a company to help promote their site
Hi, i receive around ten emails a day claiming they can help you get your site in the top ten in google, now i know most are a load of rubbish but i am just wondering if anyone has used any of these companies for a new site or an old site. I am about to launch a new site after xmas and i am just wondering if any of these companies are worth looking at to help promote the new site instead of doing all the ground work myself. Would love to know your thoughts
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Will changing our colocation affect our site's link juice?
If we change our site's server location to a new IP, will this affect anything involving SEO? The site name and links will not be changing.
Technical SEO | | 9Studios0 -
How much effect does number of outbound links have on link juice?
I am interested in your thoughts on the effect of number of outbound links (obls) on link juice passed? ie If a page linking to you has a high number of obls, how do you compute the effect of these obls and relative negative effect on linkjuice. In the event that there are three sites on which you have been offered the opportunity of a link Site A PA 30 DA50 Obls on page 10 Site B PA 40 DA50 Obls on page 15 Site C PA 50 DA50 Obls on page 20 How would you appraise each of these prospective page links (ignoring anchor text, relevancy, etc which will be constant) Is there a rule of thumb on how to compare the linkjuice passed from a site relative to its PA and the number of obls? Is it as simple as page with 10 obls passes 10x juice of page with 100 obls?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
How is link juice passed to links that appear more than once on a given page?
For the sake of simplicity, let's say Page X has 100 links on it, and it has 100 points of link juice. Each page being linked to would essentially get 1 point of link juice. Right? Now let's say Page X links to Page Y 3 times and Page Z 5 times, and every other link only once. Does this mean that Page Y would get 3 "link juice points" and Page Z would get 5? Note: I know that the situation is much more complex than this, such as the devaluation of footer links, etc, etc, etc. However, I am interested to hear peoples take on the above scenario, assuming all else is equal.
Technical SEO | | bheard0