Blog on Subdomain or Subdirectory?
-
I was wondering what the SEO impact was of having a blog on a sub domain or sub directory.
Which of the following is better?
Personally, I like making the blog a more important part of the site so 2) is preferable; however, I don't know which one is best for SEO purposes. Do the search engines consider a subdomain as a different website? Can SEO authority be passed through each equally?
What is your preference?
Regards, Dino
-
You're very welcome. I'm glad I could help
-
That is what I thought as well. Thank you for taking the time to answer.
Regards, Dino
-
Hi Dino,
The consensus in the SEO community is that search engines still identify subdomains as separate sites (with respect to how domain authority is calculated and distributed throughout the Web graph).
Therefore, the second option (i.e., companysite.com/blog) is much better from an SEO perspective because it consolidates all of the website's content under a single site and maximizes the flow of authority through that site.
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
-
Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host?
Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host? Is it accomplish-able with DNS settings or are there other considerations that might lead to complications doing this? Specifically, we are investigating install WordPress on a dedicated host, JUST to power the blog for our main website, but our main website is on an internal proprietary hosting and CMS. So basically we're trying to host: website.com --> OFF OF CURRENT INTERNAL HOSTING website.com/blog/ --> OFF OF THIRD PARTY HOSTING (USING WORDPRESS) I know this is a technical question beyond the scope of SEO, but I'm figuring there are members of the community that may have tried this already so I'm floating it here. Many thanks! Cheers.
Web Design | | AlexVelazquez0 -
Does the blog widget with latest blog-posts at homepage helps in SEO?
Hi all, We are planning to add a widget at our website homepage which displays recent blog-posts with dates. Google favours new and latest content. So will these consistent new posts help in improving website ranking? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Why use a wwwP subdomain naming convention
While working through a series of crawl reports and competitive insights for a site, I noticed one of the competitors had switched from a WWW-version to a wwwP-version. Looking back at the snapshot I took of this during the same time period in 2014, I noticed a significant drop in PA/DA by 20+/-. I'm curious to know if anybody else has experienced something similar, and if anybody can provide insights on why a change like this would even be made? I'll preface it with, everything we could see that this competitor was doing from the outside, was legitimate and propelling them in a positive direction.
Web Design | | dodgejd0 -
Mobile subdomain?
Hi, We are setting up our mobile website. Should we use a Subdomain ie m.mysite.com or should we display different content under the same domain? We are worried that we are stripping out some content and images from the mobile version that could adversly affect our SEO. Thankyou
Web Design | | ryanryan0 -
Site structure and blog tags for local with five locations
I have a client who has five locations. Their current web site was structured very well for the pre-penguin and Panda world. However it does not seem to do as well after these changes. I believe it would serve them both with their customers as well as on Google if they localized the site for each location. Currently all the content on the site if focused on one location that is in the largest metro. On the content side we have a plan to produce local content and blogs for each location. My questions are how to go about structuring the site map and blogs to provide the most local juice. I was also wondering how to properly mark up a site with a main trunk and five local branches. I am also trying to figure out how to structure the tags on the blog. On the site map itself I was planning on maintaining all the content as well as the older blogs in the main trunk of the web site. Under this trunk there is a locations page that currently goes to five pages that simply have an address as well as a bulletin board of upcoming events. The blog is directly off the main page with no tie to any location. Here are my thoughts on what I think we should do: I believe we should create a mini web site starting at the location page that has specific content and navigation related to each location. That the content should focus on the specifics of that area and what would serve that clientele the best. We should add to each branch location based on the key words and competition in that area. The blog off the main web site should continue to house the general categories that are already there as well as any other general posts. I think we should add a link to each store page with a location specific blog in each mini location site. Each mini location site should have it's own blog with specific blogs targeted towards the local market. This local blog would also feed in the general blogs from the "trunk" as they are posted. Relating back to my original questions: is what I outlined the right approach or is there a more effective way to do this? Is there any special mark up I should do to tell the directories what to do? How do I structure the tags for the blog? I was thinking of a structure like this: General blog/category/subject under the main structure : local blog/category/subject Any ideas of input on this? Ron
Web Design | | Ron_McCabe1 -
Is there any negative SEO effect when using Wordpress for your Blog?
I have a site entirely done in html, no CMS used. The blog page however, is wordpress. Wondering if this will effect us negatively in terms of SEO, having the blog that is linked to our site, a wordpress site. My gut is absolutely not, but the questions was asked....what do you think?
Web Design | | cschwartzel0 -
Subdomains For Real Estate Website
I am currently working on a proposal for a clients Wordpress website development which includes ongoing SEO after the website is developed. I have looked into a number of options and the one that seems the most cost effective involves using subdomains for the individual listings pages. What I want: clientsdomain.com/listings/idxnumber/ What I can get for a decent price: listings.clientsdomain.com/idxnumber/ So the majority of the website will actually exist on a subdomain because the IDX API will automatically populate pages for all of the MLS listings in the area (hundreds or thousands). Meanwhile the domain itself will have all the neighborhood pages and other optimized content, blogs and whatnot. My concern is that dividing the website like this will have negative effects on SEO. There wont be duplicate content across subdomain and main domain, but they will share a lot of links back and forth. I haven't found any recent sources on the topic. Almost everything I have found says that dividing a website in this manor is bad for SEO, but these articles are often many years old. Does anyone know of a Wordpress plugin/IDX company that can provide a solution that doesn't use a subdomain and actually just lists each MLS page within a directory? I am open to using another platform, I am just most familiar with Wordpress. Will using a subdomain in the ways mentioned above have a profound negative effect on SEO? Thank you for your time in responding, I greatly appreciate it.
Web Design | | TotalMarketExposure0 -
Does Blog Look And Feel Have To Match Site Look And Feel?
For years I've run WidgetsAdvice.com as a standalone blog. It's done well, 4k uniques a day, 5PR site. But it's standalone. I recently purchased Widgets.com, which doesn't get much traffic and is only a PR2. To help grow Widgets.com, my obvious desire is to move the blog (WidgetsAdvice.com) over to Widgets.com and have it sit there as: www.Widgets.com/blog so I can get the good google juice to start flowing to Widgets.com Yes, I know it's important to do the page redirects properly, etc. That's not my question. My question is: Do they have to look the same? The page design of Widgets.com is very different than the blog. When I move the blog over, do I HAVE to make it have the same look and feel as the larger site? Does google penalize you if your blog has a different page design than the site it is blogging for? My preference would be to simply move the blog over and change nothing... maybe change the menus to point to the larger site, etc. But will google not like it looking different? (Widgets is obviously an example... my site name is different)
Web Design | | brianmcc0