Is my Company Blog Causing issues?
-
We have a company blog. IE companydomain.com/blog/. Much of the content is unrelated to what we do.
So why do we do it?
-
Cover local topics that our customers may be interested in and searching for. Get them in the back door so to speak.
-
Link bait, social sharing etc
-
Develop a marketing culture that's engaged always learning.
-
Customers get to know the people behind the company.
Here's my Pickle
If i sub domain or separate the site entirely, i won't benefit from all the juice we're generating.
If i keep the status quo, since much of the content isn't directly related to my "category", logic tells me that i could be diluting my website in Googles prying eyes.
Feedback PLEASE.
-
-
It's really hard to speak in generalities, but my gut reaction is that splitting to a subdomain is going to cause you more harm than good. You'll likely fragment your links and could very well harm your root domain. If the blog was clearly harming you somehow, that would be one thing, but to do this preventively is, IMO, a very bad idea.
I'd really rather see you focus on improving the quality of the blog and better integrating it into the main site. Keep the posts you have that have solid links and traffic, but work on cleaning up the rest. Especially focus on duplicate content and any issues that may be easy wins. Meanwhile, maybe make a move toward quality-over-quantity in 2013 and reappraise how the blog fits your broader business.
-
Hello Peter,
Thanks for the feedback. I've been working on pruning for a week now. The blog is huge in terms of content compared to the main site and will only get bigger. That's my concern. There are only so many blog posts you can write about screwdrivers right?
My gut is to limit the categories we write about and focus on quality, keeping it on the same domain BUT i'm nervous about dilution.
To Subdomain or not to Subdomain....THAT is the question.
-
What kind of content volume are you talking about? It's true that more content isn't always better, and you can dilute your index, but if you've got a main site with hundreds of pages and a blog with a couple hundred pages (and that blog is attracting links that strengthen the domain), I wouldn't worry too much. If you've got a 10-page main site and a blog with 10,000 posts then, yeah, that could cause your trouble. In that case, though, I'd bet content quality is also a problem.
If you separate the blog out, you're going to lose the impact of those social shares and links. Whatever you're losing now from dilution is going to be a fraction of what you lose if you split one of your main sources of links, I strongly suspect.
If your content is spinning out of control, is there a way to prune it down? Could you drop some of your oldest or least relevant content on the blog (with no links, shares, etc.)? Could you focus on more product-relevant content moving forward? There may be some happy mediums between just splitting it off or not splitting it.
-
Hi there, looking at the very purpose behind hosting the blog on the domain itself, it is good that the blog matches the theme of the domain not going completely off the track. As you said, if you make screwdrivers and your blog talks about home improvement, its perfectly alright as you are discussing about the topic that your product is intended for or can be used for and also you are discussing about a problem or an issue that your product can address or solve.
To conclude, you do not need to worry about anything regarding the blog till you don't get distracted from the theme of your domain. Having a forum or a blog hosted on the same domain is to talk about topics that are directly or indirectly related to the theme of your domain.
Regards,
Devanur.
-
Sorry again for disagreeing. I think the blog should be on the domain – yourdomain.com/blog
_And the blog should show some characters. I mean the blog should have Google Authorship implemented and should provide enough information about the author and active participation of the author. This is not a hit and run game. You need to write content that appeals targeted audience directly. And links will automatically come to you if the content is great, however needs a marketing push from your side; no need to chase the links by creating another domain. _
-
yep, i would stick to a particular subject matter for a site and focus on it.
-
Our blog does rank well. My concern is overall subject matter. If i look at webmaster tools...screw drivers are nowhere near the top works used. I'm afraid the blog may be diluting things....but it gets links to the domain, provides good content and traffic.
-
not necessarily, if you make the page specific to that keyword/topic and provide quality info you stand a chance to rank for it. Sites like about.com , ehow and wikipedia cover different topics and rank quite well . If you do address broad keywords in your blog, depending on the competition , you will have to build links specifically to that page for that specific keyword to rank high.
A downside to this : you might confuse the visitor if they land on that page and find out that your site covers a broad range of other topics that are of no interest for them . They will bounce off your site impacting your conversion rate.
-
So you feel a subdomain or new domain would be best.
What if you make screw drivers and your blog covers topics such as home improvement, architecture, insulation, home decor, paints, fabrics.
Is that too broad?
-
My thoughts would be to separate that blog from the main site or only have related content and posts in the blog to your subject matter. If your idea is to rank high for the site related to the Genre that your site is focused on, then that blog content is not helping. You can still blog about different topics as long as they resonate with a single theme for example home improvement, home renovation, home repair etc.
If the intent of the blog is to just engage the community and spread your brand as you mentioned then it's ok but you wont really be getting any SEO benefit from the blog. Your rankings would basically be impacted with the on and off site optimization done for the site related to the keywords. If your competitor has a site ranking well and also a blog related to that topic, he should outrank you in this instance.
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
-
Job Posting Page and Structured Data Issue
We have a website where we do job postings. We manually add the data to our website. The Job Postings are covered by various other websites including the original recruiting organisations. The details of the job posting remain the same, for instance, the eligibility criteria, the exam pattern, syllabus etc. We create pages where we list the jobs and keep the detailed pages which have the duplicate data disallowed in robots.txt. Lately, we have been thinking of indexing these pages as well, as the quantum of these non-indexed pages is very high. Some of our competitors have these pages indexed. But we are not sure whether doing this is gonna be the right move or if there is a safe way to deal with this. Additionally, there is this problem that some job posts have very less data like fees, age limit, salary etc which is thin content so that might contribute to poor quality issue. Secondly, we wanted to use enriched result snippets for our job postings. Google doesn't want snippets to be used on the listing page: "Put structured data on the most detailed leaf page possible. Don't add structured data to pages intended to present a list of jobs (for example, search result pages). Instead, apply structured data to the most specific page describing a single job with its relevant details." Now, how do we handle this situation? Is it safe to allow the detailed pages which have duplicate job data and sometime not so high quality data in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dailynaukri0 -
Blog home page and SEO
Why do most blog owners not put content that is unique to the home page above the fold before posts begin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
Webmaster Tools - Structured Data 100% drop. Many people with same issue, nobody seems to understand what might have caused it.
WMT shows a significant drop in structured data markup on June 7th, steep incline by June 21st. Now the same thing happened on August 9th, with no signs of recovery. Lost 45% of our search traffic. There are many people with the same problem, and nobody seems to know what caused it. Here are a few links to some forums: #1 Google Groups, #2 Google Groups, #3 Google Groups, #4 70% drop on GWT on June 7 Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorld. On our end we see a 100% drop in breadcrumbs and a 100% drop in hcards leading to a 45% search traffic drop. Any ideas why might have happened and how to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PhilippGreitsch0 -
SEO friendly blog.
i've read somewhere that if you list too many links/articles on one page, google doesn't crawl all of them. In fact, Google will only crawl up to 100 links/articles or so. Is that true? If so, how do I go about creating a page or blog that will be SEO friendly and capable of being completely crawled by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
301 redirects and Blogger - moving blog
Is there any way to add 301 redirects to individual posts on a blogger-hosted blog? We're getting ready to finally move our blog off of Blogger and onto our own webserver. We're probably going to use BlogEngine.net to run it. right now the blog is located at blog.MySite.com. We're probably going to move it to MySite.com/Blog. We don't have any really popular posts and we only really get ~10 visits a day on about 70 posts. Just trying to figure out the best way to handle this without inadvertently shooting myself in the foot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _JP_0 -
Another Guest Blogging Question!
If you had 1 blog with good mozbar stats but hosted in the US and another with lets say 75% of the mozbar stats of the first but hosted in the UK, and your website is hosted in the UK which one would benefit SEO the most?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0