Putting A Blog On A Sub-Domain The Right Thing To Do?
-
Going to setup a blog for a 4 year old ecommerce website and was wondering if it would be a good idea to put a blog on the sub domain or just a folder like www.domain.com.au/blog
I'll be using the blog to
- Link bait articles
- Social bookmark traffic
- Linking keywords to products on the ecommerce site.
I wanted to know if
- The link juice would be greater if we cross link from sub-domain to main domain?
- Any major dis-advantages in having it on a sub-domain vs folder?
- Any other major differences?
Cheers!
-
Thanks guys, I totally forgot seomoz has it on a sub folder!
-
I suggest to go with the sub-folder option for simple reason - blog is the place for high quality content. It's better to have it within the sub-folder as it will attract links and will be delivered in the search results. It will help in building / promoting your website.
Having blog on a sub-domain or separate domain will require extra marketing efforts on your part.
-
"99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it's the best choice for all parties." (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains).
Even though this is a post made in 2006, I don't know of any relevant changes that would alter this advice.
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
-
Blog with all copied content, should it be rewritten?
Hi, I am auditing a blog where their goal is to get approved to on ad networks but the whole blog has copied content from different sources, so no ad network is approving them. Surprisingly (at least to me), is that the blog ranks really well for a few keywords (#1's and rich snippets ), has a few hundred of natural backlinks, DA is high, has never been penalized (they have always used canonical tags to the original content), traffic is a few thousand sessions a month with mostly 85% organic search, etc. overall Google likes it enough to show them high on search. So now the owner wants to monetize it. I suggested that the best approach was to rewrite their most visited articles and deleted the rest with 301 redirects to the posts that stay. But I actually haven't worked on a similar project before and can't find precise information online so I'm looking to know if anyone has a similar experience to this. A few of my questions are: If they rewrite most of the pages and delete the rest so there is no repeated/copied content, would ad networks (eg. adsense) approve them? Assuming the new articles are at least as good quality as the current ones but with original content, is there a risk on losing DA? since pretty much it will look like a new site once they are done They have thousands of articles but only about 200 hundred get most visits, which would be the ones getting rewritten, so it should be fine to redirect the deleted ones to the remaining? Thanks for any suggestions and/or tips on this 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArturoES0 -
Low Domain Authority
Hi Our Domain Authority has dropped recently from 29 > 23 - which is really low. I wondered if anyone had any ideas of why this might be? http://www.key.co.uk/en/key I'm seeing ranking/traffic improvements for SEO & I'm not currently building any bad backlinks, I did a sweep to Disavow any bad ones last Oct. I am planning to add good quality links, but is there anything else I can do to improve the authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Ranking Above sub-domains
So I work for a company that has a very successful affiliate that operates under a third level domain name such as "region.company.com". Their SEO practices are very good and they rank highly in keyword searches. However "company.com" does not even though it is not a subdomain. Even after optimizing the company.com's pages etc, the regional sub domain ranks much higher for keywords and the main company fails to rank at all. Is Google discounting the main company's page? Is it a matter of trust or time? or is it something else? How can I get Google to prioritize the main company website rather than a lower level domain affiliate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resolute0 -
How do you raise domain authority?
Hey guys, hoping you can help me out here. I've been tasked with raising several sites' domain authority to a level of 30. Right now, many of them are hovering around 20. Three weeks into this project and our numbers have dropped 1-2 points on average but I don't think our efforts would reflect that this quickly. From what I've read online, a good strategy is guest posting on relevant sites and collecting links from sites with higher DAs. I've also read at least one Moz article about this potentially being ineffective. I've read some of the related posts but they seem mostly dated and the answers didn't seem to help me. Hoping someone with some experience with this can help me out, I appreciate it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinAB0 -
Merging Domains
Up until last week, we had separate domains for each of our 3 products. We've now merged two products to sit under one URL. The merge coincided with a CMS upgrade which effectively killed all of our old URLs save for the homepage. Is it best for me to 301 the old homepage to it's new place, as well as the rest of the old site's top pages to according pages on the new site? Or is there a better solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Subdomain blog vs. subfolder blog in 2013
So I've read the posts here: http://moz.com/community/q/subdomain-blog-vs-subfolder-blog-in-2013 and many others, Matt Cutts video, etc. Does anyone have direct experience that its still best practice to use the sub folder? (hopefully a moz employee can chime in?) I have a client looking to use hubspot. They are preaching with the Matt Cutts video. I'm in charge of SEO / marketing and am at odds with them now. I'd like to present the client with more info than "in my experience in the past I've seen subdirectories work." Any help? Articles? etc?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | no6thgear0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0