SEO advice with having a blog on sub domain.
-
Righto, so:
I've been working on our company website www.nursesfornurses.com.au which is built on .asp which is a real pain because the site is built so messy and on a very dated CMS which means I have to go back to the dev every time I want to make a change.
We've made the decision to move the site over to Wordpress in stages. So, (and I hope logically), i've started by making them a proper blog with better architecture to start targeting industry related keywords.
I had to put it on a sub domain as the current hosting does not support Wordpress http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/
The previous blog is here: http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blogIts not live yet, so I'm just looking for SEO advice or issues I might encounter by having the blog on a sub domain. In terms of user experience, I realise that there needs a clearer link back to the main website, I'm just trying to work out the best way to do it...
Any advice / criticism is greatly welcomed.
Thanks
-
So If i move the content of the current blog:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blogTo my subdomain:
http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/Should I be expecting to see a decrease in rankings, even if I do 301 redirects from all the blog posts to the new ones..?
I'm just trying to get this as black and white as possible for my directors.
-
If you are looking for the fastest way to do this, just clone and backup your existing WP site and database, then move to your test environment and start building your new site there. That way you will already have all of your old blog posts in place, and save a ton of time, especially if the blog has been styled to look like the main URL.
For the blog, I agree with others in stating you should keep it as part of your main website. Doesnt make sense to have it on a subdomain unless you have to, like your old ASP configuration.
-
I noticed in the Matt Cutts article that: news.google.com would be suitable on a sub domain, so perhaps this will apply...?
we've added a fair amount of content which was previously in the members area so in some ways this is a separate entity
If I setup 301 redirects on all the blog pages pages would this pass the page authority to the new blog pages?
-
Thanks for your responses, and I agree that we need to move host but its a pretty big thing to do and in our current situation it will take months to redevelop the site completely to Wordpress so we really have to do it in stages.
I did notice in the Matt Cutts article that: news.google.com would be suitable on a sub domain, so perhaps this will apply, also we've added a fair amount of content which was previously in the members area.
If I setup 301 redirects on these pages would this not pass the page authority to the new blog?
Thanks for your responses, this situation is looking tricker than ever!!
-
Stelios gives the technical details. Now for the encouragement....
For all of the work that you can put into a website, you owe it to yourself to ditch a host, a CMS, an SEO, a developer, a technology or anything else that forces you to run a blog on a subdomain.
-
Hello,
Thanks for your question. My advice is to keep your blog on your main domain, not separate it to be a subdomain.
The reason for this is a subdomain is it's own separate entity and you won't get the benefit of the authority that's part of your main domain, and blog posts should be relevant to a service and internal link to them. For example, how this post links to the Nurse CPD page (except I'd use Nurse CPD has the anchor text, not the brand name in this case).
Matt Cutts wrote about this in 2007, and I think the information is still valid. In his post, he stated that his preferred use of a subdomain was to separate out information that is completely different. For example, if you had a staff portal, this could sit on a subdomain as it's purpose would than the information on your main website.
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
-
Sub-domain or not???
Hi, We're setting up a forum for our users (our target audience responds extremely well to forums). I was wondering if it should be set up on a sub-domain or not. I'm leaning towards sub-domain, but our devs say this will impact how they approach it so I'd like to give them an answer asap so we can proceed with planning it! Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Stopped ranking. Suspect links with keyword in blog posts and blog username. What to do? Disvow?
One of our staff thought it was a good idea to comment in 30 blogs in our niche using "keyword" as username in blog post linked to our website and additionally adding links to our website in the posts. We now got caught by panda or penguin (google confirmed no manual penalty was taken) and not ranking anymore for this keyword. No notification in webmaster tools neither. We have links from around 90 root domains of which 30 are from these blog posts. What would you suggest to do? Just building more legitimate links so that share of bad links goes down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Using google disvow tool? We would then loose potential to get later legitimate links from these sites? Any ideas/suggestions?0 -
Domain and Sitemap Question
Hi - I am hoping you can help me with this issue we are currently trying to solve. We are hosting our mobile site's content on a different domain than what the URL of the site is, though owned by same company. In Google Webmasters tool we have the mobile sitemap under "sitemaps.xyz.com", however the URL of the site is "m.xyz.com". We have submitted 60MM pages in the mobile sitemap, but only 1MM pages have been indexed. Do you think this set up causes confusion with the bots? Does this affect the crawlability of the site? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ladylana
Eva0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
Where do I redirect a domain to strengthen another domain?
I've got a UK domain that I need to redirect to a US domain. Should I point it to the root domain or a landing page off the root and what it the benefit to doing one over the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCorp0 -
Redirecting Powerful Domains
What do you do if you have a client that never implemented a 301 redirect on their domain? For example here are the OSE stats for the URLs; http://url.com PA: 48 DA: 50 LRD: 65 TL: 1,084 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 http://www.url.com PA: 51 DA: 50 LRD: 165 TL: 2,271 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 G+1:3 My first instincts are to redirect the first one to the second one, but is it too late for that? Will that screw up all of their established stats? Any input or examples of past experiences with this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
What are the Best Practices for moving a blog from subdomain to domain/subcategory?
Howdy SEOmoz fans! (couldn't resist). I'm moving a wordpress blog from blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. Trying to do it right the first time and cover all my bases. Issues I'm trying to handle correctly, in varying degrees of importance: External LInks Internal Links Google Friendly Traffic Routing in a dynamic environment (wordpress, 301, .htaccess, etc.) Thanks so much for any and all input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NTM1 -
Are sites that leave out www from domain at a disadvantage to domains with www in url
I know this has been discussed but was wondering what would be the best approach from an SEO perspective. I quite like the idea of setting up websites with domains without www but always worry that setting up domains without www has a disadvantage because user are use to referring to sites with the www included. Thus one of my fears are that users would link back using www version which will mean even if you do a 301 redirect that some of the link juice would be lost. I know some famous sites have used this convention such as http://searchenginewatch.com/ so think it would be possible but still concerned that for new sites it would be better to rather stick to conventions. What are your opinions about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SABest0