What would you do with this odd Blog configuration?

[Muhammad-Isap]

G'day fellow digital marketers!

I'm analysing a new site in analytics. Having been hit by Panda, and being plagued with a variety of issues - one that's got me scratching my head is their blog configuration.

Now, on most sites you'll have something like: www.clientsite.com/blog

All blog posts would then sit under the blog page: www.clientsite.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post

Anyway, on this blog - when a new post has been created historically - they've all been placed directly under the homepage, so when you click a link on: www.clientsite.com/blog

You instead arrive at: www.clientsite.com/this-is-a-blog-post

So, we have 150+ posts equally sharing the hompage authority - detracting from their ability to rank for their core services pages.

I'm thinking of going to town on the 301 re-direct wagon, changing:

www.clientsite.com/this-is-a-blog-post to www.clientsite.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post

But I'd like to know your thoughts and experiences before I get to work!

Thanks in advance guys and gals,

John.

[David-Kley]

In reality it's up to you. If you think the site makes more sense using the /blog/BLOGPOST format, then go for it. It can help search engines and users to understand that this is the blog section of the site. If all of your posts fall under a certain category or topic, you could also change the separator to use something that is more SEO-friendly, such as yoursite.com/marketing/your-blog-post.

The whole site and all the linked pages share your "homepage authority". Because you are not using a blog URL in between makes little difference. Your sitemap is the area that you can set the importance of these pages, which we generally set as a 5 or 6 out of 10 if you are concerned about the way that they show up in accordance with your main site in search results.

Also, it may take a bit of time to process all the redirects, so see if that is truly a matter of importance.

Hope this helps!

[ATP]

P.S. The 301 directs would add a time aspect that in my opinion would make me think twice. But if you dont mind re-directing the 150 pages go for it.

Either way dont worry. It should be fine.

[ATP]

Hi John,

Let me firstly say that this isn't as much as a problem as you think (at least in my opinion).

"So, we have 150+ posts equally sharing the hompage authority - detracting from their ability to rank for their core services pages."

This is simply not true as far as I am aware. Your homepage will only pass authority to the pages it links too. Just because they appear to be under the homepage directory doesn't really mean anything. Each page is treated as an individual and will only gain authority from those pages that link to it..

Now technically, yes from a good SEO point of view your blog posts should be /blog/subjectpost.html as it is both informative to the user and search engines by telling them this is part of your blog and is about whatever subject.

BUT... /blog/ doesn't tell people anything about the content of the post itself. Say the category is widgets, then   /widgets/widgetkeywordpost.html is beneficial because it tells everyone visiting the page that this post is about widgets.

There will be a simple setting somewhere in ur CMS where it will decide where the post should be created. So changing this to /blog/ wont be too hard. If it were me, I would change it but only because OCD. I dont think you would be experience anything negative because of this.