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.
Blog.mysite.com or mysite.com/blog?
-
Hi, I'm just curious what the majority think of what's the best way to start a blog on your website for SEO benefits. Is it better to have it under a sub domain or a directory? Or does it even matter?
-
From everything I've read, I agree that your safest bet is to go with the subfolder.
-
I agree with Tim and Adam and that said, sub-folders are better as a general rule of thumb for sure.
You might also want to refer to other similar questions here on SEOMOZ.
-
http://www.seomoz.org/q/blogs-are-best-when-hosted-on-domain-subdomain-or* http://www.seomoz.org/q/setting-up-a-company-blog-subdomain-or-new-url* http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-vs-blog
and the post from Matt Cutts as well as the article from Rand that Adam mentioned.
-
-
I think Adam has hit the nail on the head. We recently moved our blog site from a subdomain to a subfolder and 301'd all the old URL’s with the intention that any entries that users find genuinely useful or interesting will be potentially linked to, thereby providing a benefit to the root domain.
As long as your blog is tightly related to your core business activity then I would go down the subfolder root although, in all honesty, I think subdomains potentially look a little more professional.
-
Hi Tim,
I generally prefer to go with the subfolder option (mysite.com/blog) rather than the subdomain (blog.mysite.com). The reason I prefer this option is because having the blog in a subfolder means that it will benefit from the value of the root domain. In other words, links that are obtained by the root domain will pass that value to the subfolders. However, a subdomain is treated as a separate site and therefore not much value is passed via the root.
Rand provides an excellent answer in a previous Q&A of a similar topic:
Hope that helps,
Adam.
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
-
Updating Old Content at Scale - Any Danger from a Google Penalty/Spam Perspective?
We've read a lot about the power of updating old content (making it more relevant for today, finding other ways to add value to it) and republishing (Here I mean changing the publish date from the original publish date to today's date - not publishing on other sites). I'm wondering if there is any danger of doing this at scale (designating a few months out of the year where we don't publish brand-new content but instead focus on taking our old blog posts, updating them, and changing the publish date - ~15 posts/month). We have a huge archive of old posts we believe we can add value to and publish anew to benefit our community/organic traffic visitors. It seems like we could add a lot of value to readers by doing this, but I'm a little worried this might somehow be seen by Google as manipulative/spammy/something that could otherwise get us in trouble. Does anyone have experience doing this or have thoughts on whether this might somehow be dangerous to do? Thanks Moz community!
On-Page Optimization | | paulz9990 -
Best schema option for condos / condominiums?
Hey guys, I'm doing a review on some schema on some of our sites. Most of them are generic using LocalBusiness. There are a few more specific schemas I could use, but not sure what would be the most relevant. Wondering if any of you have a suggestion or ideas? https://schema.org/Residence https://schema.org/LodgingBusiness https://schema.org/ApartmentComplex or I could just stick with LocalBusiness. I'm leaning towards LodgingBusiness or ApartmentComplex.... but when I think of LodgingBusiness I think of something temporary / vacation type deal like hotels. Apartments... kind of self explanatory, a condominium isn't exactly an apartment but perhaps it is more comparable to an apartment than a hotel, motel or inn. What are you thoughts on this? Also, which "format" is better to use RDFa, microdata, or JSON-LD. Does it matter?
On-Page Optimization | | donnieath0 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Recommended Schema for a Collection/Category page?
Hi There! Taking on a small project up updating and adding in Schema to a clients site; a previous developer half put in data vocabulary. In my planning I was wondering if their would be a best schema type for category page of products - or a collection of products? Any ideas and experience? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | paul-bold0 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
State Abbreviations and/or Fully Spelled Out?
Should State names be abbreviated and/or fully spelled out in title tags, meta descriptions and body content? Does Google know that VT = Vermont?
On-Page Optimization | | lbohen0 -
Any SEO effect(s) / impact of Meta No Cache?
Hi SEOMoz Guys, Hope you guys are doing well. I've been searching online and bumped into this archived page (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/34982/meta-nocache-affect-ranking). I would like to get an updated take on this issue whether or not the meta no cache code on a page bears negative/positive or no SEO impact / effect. <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache"/> Thanks! Steve
On-Page Optimization | | sjcbayona-412182 -
Post Title - Use the blog's name or not?
In the tile of my post, shoudl I used my blog's name in it at the end or emit the blog name. EX: title of post with keywords | name of blog OR EX: title of post with keywords The site's name is 3 words long, so I'm worrying that those extra words are diluting the keywords in the post's name that I'm trying to target.
On-Page Optimization | | gregalam0