Moving Blog from www.topic.domain.com to www.domain.com/blog

[CSawatzky]

Hi Fellow Mozzers,

Just started off here on seomoz.org and am super happy to have joined the community! I've recently started a new job as web optimization manager for an education company. There is a lot to do and one of my first tasks is to figure a better strategy for our current blog.

I've convinced our management to move our blog from topic.domain.com to domain.com/blog. My research has shown that this is a better strategy so that our blog can receive the DA of our root domain, get more people to click through our site, and even receive more natural searches (PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong on this).

Anyway, our blog is currently hosted as a Wordpress blog and we're wondering if it's more worthwhile to build a blog platform ourselves or continue using Wordpress. I am not a technical guy and don't know the backend stuff to make it happen, but my concern is primarily for the optimum search capacity. Also, our bloggers frequently put links to different portions of our website - does this hold any negative  SEO value in terms of too much internal linking? I personally wouldn't assume so, but then again I could be wrong. Finally, we also track our main website using Google Analytics- currently, the only tracking we have installed on our blogs is the default provided by Wordpress (yes yes I know, but that's why i'm here -- to fix these weaknesses). I'm assuming we will be able to better track using GA when the switch is made.

So, I guess my questions are:

(1) Is my research correct in that it's better to have our blog hosted as domain.com/blog over topic.domain.com

(2) Are there any best practices in making this switch and/or any negative implications with continuing to use Wordpress or should we build our own platform (we have the internal resources to do so, but would prefer to take the easiest and best route in terms of SEO and community building).

(3) Will it still be just as easy to track using GA.

Thank you!!

Pedram

[CSawatzky]

Thank you!

[jws8118]

It is usually a good thing to do some natural internal linking from your editorial content to your main site or product/service pages.  Be careful not to "over-optimize" the anchor text when you link internally or you stand a high risk of an over optimization penalty.

[CSawatzky]

Along these lines, we do a lot of internal linking from our blogs to other content on our website. Can this serve to hurt us in anyway?

[CSawatzky]

Thank you both!

[jws8118]

1.  Yes you are correct about moving the blog to /blog so you can get the DA value from the root domain.  It also will help your root domain more to have the content at /blog b/c any links you generate to your content will go back to the root domain DA.

2.  I wouldn't recommend switching from wordpress.  There is just no business case (SEO-wise) for switching away from Wordpress.  The Yoast SEO plugin makes on page optimization and technical seo for wordpress a no-brainer and the WP community support will more than make up for any advantages you might think of on a propreitary system.

3.  Yes tracking on GA will be suffice.  You may want to setup a custom profile to track just the blog content in google analytics if you have someone who you want to be able to view blog analytics but not the entire site analytics.  Just a suggestion!

Sounds like you are on the right path, hope this helps!

[matbennett]

Hi Pedram. Complex looking questions, but I think that the answers are fairly straight forward.

1. Short version, yes.  As you say, this will allow your blog to benefit from the authority of your main site.  I say short answer, as it is a little dependent on what you want to achieve, but presumably you want to rank the blog posts, so "Yes".

2. I'm not personally a bit wordpress fan. I am also a big fan of bespoke build.  Despite those 2 facts I would struggle to find any justification of bespoke over wordpress other in some very specific circumstances.

Best practice would mostly revolve around updating inbound links and 301ing from the old address.

3. Yes. Possibly even easier, as there are plugins that will set it all up in the right places for you.