Should I host my blog on-site or off-site?

[makeshiftyy]

I'm working on a personal project at the moment...basically the blog will be active before the website - it's one of those things where the blog is the journey to the finished website kinda thing (picture it sort of like an adventure traveller who plans to write a book about his travels, and also blogs about his experiences as they happen - eventually leading up to the launch of the book).

Ideally the blog would be a part of the website, so all the links the blog gets help your website to rank (and it's the website I'm interested in ranking obviously, not the blog). But there are two  problems:

1. I don't really want people using my website before it's completed.

2. I'd kinda like to have a different design and theme to the blog, and for it to have it's own domain and branding. I also don't want to clog up my website with random blog posts - and I'd like the freedom of an independent platform to do things that my website is not designed for.

Any suggestions on how to solve this problem? Is there a way to let Google know that the blog is a part of my site even though it's on a different domain? How would I funnel all of the link-juice from the blog most effectively?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Clancy,

Best practices is to host your blog on the same domain, and same subdomain, as your main website. This offers so many long term benefits, you're almost throwing everything away if you consider anything else.

Depending on the technology you are using to construct your website, there are different ways to prevent your users from accessing your site, but there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you're using WordPress, you can simply install a maintenance or "coming-soon" type plugin to keep visitors out, and then install your blog on a subdirectory.  example.com/blog

If this isn't possible and you want to host your blog elsewhere, keeping on a subdomain as Jim suggested would be the next best alternative. Apart from linking to your site, there's not much else you can do to pass link juice between the two sites. You can, after your site launches, move your blog and migrate your traffic via 301 redirects.

[jim_cetin]

How about a subdomain for your blog "myblog.mydomain.com".

This would give you the requirements in hand you described before.

If you host your domain with a hosting provider, then you normally can create subdomains yourself.

regards,

jim cetin