Is having two blogs bad?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I'm under the impression we should only have one blog, but the company I work for wants to have our original blogger site AND link it to a blog on our website. We're basically just duplicating content, which I know to be bad. Is there any benefit to using both? If not, (which I'm guessing there isn't) which one should we keep? Does google prefer we use blogger, instead of putting it on our company site? Do the links we get from blogger help for SEO more than just putting it on our site?

Any advice would be appreciated.

P.S. The Blogger account has been around longer, but it doesn't have substantial traffic. It gets about 200 pages vies a month, right now. However, the one on the website gets far less than that.

[EGOL]

I believe that google started blogger to make blogging immediately easy for people who have no technical inclination and who would not want to pay the costs of hosting a website.

In my opinion, a law firm is not an appropriate user of Blogger.  They should have the content on their own website where it can be used to impress their visitors and demonstrate why the visitor should hire this law firm.

Lots of people think that links from blogger to their website are going to be valuable.  That is only true of outside websites are linking to the blogger blog.  And when that happens only a fraction of the power will pass to the law firm site.  However, if the blog is on the law firm site and an outside website links to a blog post then the entire law firm site will benefit from that link.

If I owned a site like the one that you are talking about, I would look at the existing blogger blog and if it does not have very many links then I would move all of the posts to the law firm site.   All future blogging would be on the law firm site.

All of my blogs are on my own domain.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

As always, thank you everyone for your advice. This community is great! I really do appreciate it.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Well, we were under the impression that since Google owned Blogger, they would value those blogs more (whether they said so or not). Apparently, this thread has made it clear they don't.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Our conversion rate for referral visits is around 5 to 10% depending on the blog. Does the unique phone number tracking work well? I don't know much about it. We talked about doing that, but I though it might confuse people, if they saw a different number every time. Has that ever been a legitimate concern?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

We were working on the assumption, since blogger is a Google property, it would be best to have it there. Glad to know that's not a big concern.

[EGOL]

I can't imagine why a law firm would blog from an outhouse rather than blog on their own site?

[Chris.Menke]

Have you identified how many of those 200 visits are converting in some way (unique phone number being tracked or referral visits from there to your domain)?  You could keep what you've got on blogger and stop blogging there, delete the content that's been duplicated on your domain and just continue blogging from your domain.  The value of moving the content already hosted on blogger may be minimal.

Your law firm is going to look better to potential clients if those prospects find content on the law firms domain rather than on a freebie alternative.

[zeepartner]

Yes, you're on the right track. Duplication bad. If you already spend resources for blogging, make sure the blog is part of the website you want users to purchase your products and services.

If management really cannot be conviced to stop this duplication craziness, at least get them to implement rel=canonical pointing to the company blog on your own domain to minimize duplication impact.

[TomRayner]

Hey there

Your assumptions are correct - there is no benefit from doing this and you're actually running a significant risk with the duplicate content.

I'd highly recommend moving the blog permanently to your own website.  Think of it this way - would you rather have a link from a blog post that might have a few social shares and links - or would you rather have those social shares and links be pointing directly to your domain?

It has to be the second option for me. Having your blog posts sitting on your own domain will mean your root domain will directly benefit from any sharing or linking to the blog post - while potential clients are also landing directly to your site, shortening the conversion path.  There won't be any added benefit to have it done externally just because blogger is a Google property - even if there was it certainly wouldn't outweigh having those ranking signals directly pointing your site.

Hope this helps.

[Schwaab]

I wouldn't intentionally create duplicate content.  I would talk with your company and stress the importance of avoiding duplicate content creation.

As for where to host the blog.  I would recommend hosting it on your site if possible.  Links to the blog posts will benefit the domain it's hosted on.  The only way to really benefit your site would be to link to pages on your site from within blog posts; however, that would not be as beneficial as hosting the blog on your company's site and building links directly to your company's domain.