Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?
-
I want to put blog on my site. The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog). I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website). The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks. That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog.
Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right?
Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy.
Thoughts?
Thank you for your time.
-
Yes, search engines definitely know that subdomains are hooked to your domain, and there's evidence that search engines will count links toward a subdomain to your domain. However, there's speculation that those links are slightly discounted in the level of authority they pass -- they are a stronger signal to your subdomain -- and it's still best practice for your SEO to put your blog on a subfolder instead of a subdomain.
-
Does that mean that Moz believes backlinks to a subdomain are counted by search engines as backlinks to the main domain.
SOrry I keep asking but to get the blog in a subfolder will require a ton of work on IT's part so I am trying to see if the subdomain will work just as well.
-
Yes, we do. Unless you click the checkbox that says not to crawl subdomains.
-
I am hoping if we put out good content we will get many backlink from reputable sources so spammy links are not a concern.
Does SEOMoz count backlinks to subdomain as backlinks to main site in their reports?
thanks for your post.
-
I actually prefer the blog be on a subdomain if there are going to be several back links on it. It is a way of protecting your root domain from a link that might have seemed good, but has a spammy link neighborhood or turns out to be negative. It is my personal preference. The downfall is that the traffic isn't going to your site, it is going to your subdomain which is why the best practice is to use /blog.
I would double check with your site developer/IT person to find out if it is really necessary to use the subdomain. Is this by change a WP plugin? It is my understanding that there are several eCommerce platforms with no integrated blog and the WP plugin is only compatible on a subdomain.
-
Thanks for clarifying what you mean about 'the main purpose of the blog' - sounds like you get it.
Here's an article I could find on the update back in 2011: https://www.seroundtable.com/subdomains-google-webmaster-tools-13960.html
Reading through it again, the update was more about links from subdomains to main domains being considered internal links rather than external. It's easy to assume that if Google is seeing the subdomain as part of the main domain, then links to the subdomain will help the entire domain - but from my experience, subdomains never perform as well as a directory/folder structure (on their own or in helping the domain as a whole). I would try my best to avoid using a subdomain.
-
Thank you for the response.
- The main thing we will be using the blog for is creating compelling content that our target audience will find useful and then hopefully link to or share. I don't want to put on the subdomain if these earned links are not going to benefit the whole site as it would if I had the blog in a subfolder
SO just to confirm you are saying in 2011 or so this stopped being an issue and now any link I get to pages in the subdomain will benefit the whole site as far as backlinks?
Thanks
-
Hi there! So lots of thoughts came to mind as I read your question, so here it goes:
- Yes, links to subdomains are counted towards the entire domain - I believe it was 2010 or 2011 when Google announced this change, which was to prevent black hat SEOs from using their own subdomain as a link farm/wheel to the main domain- which leads me to my next thought...
- This statement raises an immediate red flag: "The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks."
- Generally, it's best to have your blog at domain.com/blog - of course there are sometimes technical limitations preventing this.
I hope this helps!
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
-
What Are Internal Linking Best Practices For Blogs?
We have a blog for our e-commerce site. We are posting about 4-5 blog posts a month, most of them 1500+ words. Within the content, we have around 10-20 links pointing out to other blog posts or products/categories on our site. Except for the products/categories, the links use non-optimized generic anchor text (i.e guide, sizing tips, planning resource). Are there any issues or problems as far as SEO with this practice? Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Launching Brand New Subdomain To Outrank & Outperform Main Domain
Fellow Mozzers! I have a tricky problem that may or may not have a viable solution. It's one that our team are 100% pressing ahead with regardless & I wanted to canvass some opinion on what options I have. We have the Main Company Site which has been going for +15 years, has a DA of 58 and 63,000 links pointing at it. It currently ranks on page 1 for a number of our important keywords. However.... We are now launching a Subdomain, which will be something like marketing.maincompanysite.com which we now want to drive a lot more of our traffic to. In particular for items like new customer acquisition, product discovery etc. In fact we would actually rather the subdomain outrank our main site for branded queries. However the Main Site is still important for existing customers who login to our product and we don't want to do anything that will destabilize it's rankings too much. My questions are: Are there any strategies I can use to get a subdomain (with no links or history) outranking the main site in position 1 on Google? Main site should still rank in position 2! Any other tips to actively take legacy traffic from a main site onto a subdomain seamlessly. Should we just be 301 redirecting unnecessary pages on the old site to new and improved pages on the subdomain? There will still be a 100,000+ pages on the main site, lots of authority and traffic going through it. It's not becoming redundant. Thanks so much guys - hopefully I've explained that okay!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattStott40 -
Site Wide Footer Links Exception, Any Advice ?
I was reading the following Q&A on site wide footer links, http://moz.com/community/q/site-wide-links-from-another-domain-could-these-cause-a-problem I feel my situation is slightly different however,we have lots of international sites linking to each other through these links like our sites for different counties and languages so our German, French and Spanish sites, http://www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/ Our main UK site has always ranked very well and has never really had a problem despite always having had these followed sitewide footer links, Because of this we regularly get high amount of visitors performing English language searches from different counties and i don't think it is a bad thing having more country/language specific sites of ours available in the footer for visitors that may prefer a more localized site, Our main website has to be at least 10+ years old at least, has a lot of strong links compared to our competitors, but the smaller German and Spanish sites are relatively smaller in size and most only 1-2 years old, my big fear is that these smaller sites would not be able to stand on there own without these footer links from our main site, After reading the community question caused me to question this ?, should i take a leap of faith and no-follow all of these site wide footer links connecting all of our sites ? we never really had a problem ranking so i don't really see the need but would this be the best thing to do ? Thank you, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Why is my blog out-ranking my main site?
Please see attached ranking history chart. On June 5th the chart shows that my main site is not coming up under our main keyword "door hangers" From then on, our blog took over. Any ideas why? Thanks Andrea lpEBciu.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Best possible linking on site with 100K indexed pages
Hello All, First of all I would like to thank everybody here for sharing such great knowledge with such amazing and heartfelt passion.It really is good to see. Thank you. My story / question: I recently sold a site with more than 100k pages indexed in Google. I was allowed to keep links on the site.These links being actual anchor text links on both the home page as well on the 100k news articles. On top of that, my site syndicates its rss feed (Just links and titles, no content) to this page. However, the new owner made a mess, and now the site could possibly be seen as bad linking to my site. Google tells me within webmasters that this particular site gives me more than 400K backlinks. I have NEVER received one single notice from Google that I have bad links. That first. But, I was worried that this page could have been the reason why MY site tanked as bad as it did. It's the only source linking so massive to me. Just a few days ago, I got in contact with the new site owner. And he has taken my offer to help him 'better' his site. Although getting the site up to date for him is my main purpose, since I am there, I will also put effort in to optimizing the links back to my site. My question: What would be the best to do for my 'most SEO gain' out of this? The site is a news paper type of site, catering for news within the exact niche my site is trying to rank. Difference being, his is a news site, mine is not. It is commercial. Once I fix his site, there will be regular news updates all within the niche we both are in. Regularly as in several times per day. It's news. In the niche. Should I leave my rss feed in the side bars of all the content? Should I leave an achor text link on the sidebar (on all news etc.) If so: there can be just one keyword... 407K pages linking with just 1 kw?? Should I keep it to just one link on the home page? I would love to hear what you guys think. (My domain is from 2001. Like a quality wine. However, still tanked like a submarine.) ALL SEO reports I got here are now Grade A. The site is finally fully optimized. Truly nice to have that confirmation. Now I hope someone will be able to tell me what is best to do, in order to get the most SEO gain out of this for my site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richardo24hr0 -
Outgoing affiliate links and link juice
I have some affiliate websites which have loads of outgoing affiliate links. I've discussed this with a SEO friend and talked about the effect of the link juice going out to the affiliate sites. To minimize this I've put "no follows" on the affiliate links but my friend says that even if you have no follow Google still then diminishes the amount of juice that goes to internal pages, for example if the page has 10 links, 9 are affiliate with no follow - Google will only give 10% of the juice to the 1 internal page. Does anyone know if this is the case? and whether there are any good techniques to keep as much link juice on the site as possible without transferring to affiliate links? Appreciate any thoughts on this! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ventura0 -
Site Wide Internal Navigation links
Hello all, All our category pages www.pitchcare.com/shop are linked to from every product page via the sidebar navigation. Which results in every category page having over 1700 links with the same anchor text. I have noticed that the category pages dont appear to be ranked when they most definately should be. For example http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html is not ranked for the term "moss control" instead another of our deeper pages is ranked on page 1. Reading a previous SEO MOZ article · Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | toddyC
I recently had my second run-in with a penalty at Google that appears to punish sites for excessive internal linking with "optimized" (or "keyword stuffed anchor text") links. When the links were removed (in both cases, they were found in the footer of the website sitewide), the rankings were restored immediately following Google's next crawl, indicating a fully automated filter (rather than a manual penalty requiring a re-consideration request). Do you think we may have triggered a penalty? If so what would be the best way to tackle this? Could we add no follows on the product pages? Cheers Todd0 -
Is there any SEO benefit for links shared in Facebook feeds or wall posts?
Is there any SEO benefit for links shared in Facebook feeds or wall posts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NinjaTEL30