Optimizing blog domain for maximum rank/traffic potential
-
Hello wonderful Moz community! I need some advice. Here is the situation: I work in a small division within a much larger company. We each have our own domain, i.e. www.parent.com and www.child.com. We (the child) have a domain authority of 57, while our parent has a domain authority of 86. Our blog lives on blogs.parent.com/child. My understanding is that www.brand.com/blogs is better for SEO than blogs.brand.com (we had no control of directory structure decisions at the parent level).
Given all that, in terms of maximizing traffic to our domain, would we be better off moving our blog to www.child.com/blogs? Here are a couple of potential pros/cons bouncing around in my newbie brain:
a) By moving the blog to our domain, our whole site could benefit from having any external links our blog posts earn point back to our domain vs. our parent's domain.
b) On the other hand, leaving the blog on our parent's domain and then linking to our content from posts over there might give our content a boost. (Of course, that theory is shot down if Google recognizes our parent/child relationship and doesn't reward our site with the benefit of linkbacks coming from our parent domain.)
What say you? Are there other angles to this I’m not even considering? If you think the right decision is to move the blog over to our site, any suggestions on how not to screw that up? (301’s, etc.) Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
-John
-
Thanks Robert and Erick for your quick and thoughtful answers! Robert, to clarify based on your foursquare dilemma, we are currently in situation 1) and it sounds like we ought to move to situation 4).
Erick, regarding the point you make in reason #4 ("the way you have it set up right now you may not be getting the DA of your parent site anyway") -- It appears that in terms of DA, www.parent.com and blogs.parent.com are the same. However, the TF and CF for blogs.parent.com are significantly lower than www.parent.com (and lower than www.child.com), so I think your point is valid.
I hear what you're saying regarding the Parent/Child relationship and the need to be careful. I think our situation is very much analogous to the P&G example, so I think we'd be fine.
Thanks again to you both for the great insights!
-
Hi John,
I would go with www.child.com/blog
Here is why:
1. As you stated this structure ranks better due to your blog getting your domains authority.
2. As you gain page authority for your posts your domain will also benefit.
3. Your child content is most likely relevant to your child domain.
4. the way you have it set up right now you may not be getting the DA of your parent site anyway because it is set up as a subdomain. Double check but I believe Google sees sub domains as there own deal so the metrics for your main domain do not match up. Do some testing in MOZ OSE to check both your root domain, www subdomain, and blog sub domain you will see different values for DA and PA. You can also check this way on Majestic and your TF and CF will be different as well.Strategy you may want to use is:
1. Move your blog to the child domain
2. New content should be posted here
3. You can syndicate the same post to the parent domain if you want, but make sure you use a rel canonical pointing to the original content at www.child.com/blog/post-name, that way you pass the credit back to the original post on the child domain and avoid duplicate content issues.
4. If you just want to get rid of the old blog, you can 301 the posts to the new post URLs, or rel canonical them pointing back to the NEW Original Content location at www.child.com/blog/post-nameParent Child Relationship:
This is just my opinion based on what I have encountered. If you are a manufacturer, and you have multiple brands, it is totally ok for you to have a Manufacturers website, and websites for each of your brands. Think of Proctor and Gamble, they have a P&G website with pages that spotlight their brands, and then they have individual sites for each of their brands. The P&G parent site links to all of its children. I am sure it passes authority that way, but each of the brand sites have also built their own authority.I believe the thing to look out for is, if you are building other sites to focus on brands or products, like P&G does, you should be fine. But if you are building child sites just so you can build links, like a PBN (private/public blog network) then you run a chance of getting a penalty. Just be careful and make sure you only try to get credit in one place and I think you will be all good. I am sure others have other thoughts on that, so you just have to make your own decision and track your progress to make sure you are getting the results you need.
Let me know if you have any questions, we have built the parent child relationships above before and it has worked great. No penalties and we are able to control most of page one for the traffic bringing brand related queries.
-
Hi John,
Your "newbie brain" is not deceiving you - the placement of a blog on your website for direct value to your brand is best practice.
The big questions I have are whether or not the information/content you would be placing on your blog would be directly relevant to services and/or products your parent company provides, and whether or not your parent company features their own blog.
This creates a foursquare dilemma:
- Parent company has a blog, and Child company features blog on same domain (subdomain)
If this is the case, you are creating blog overkill on 1 domain and leaving your child company in the lurch. I don't suggest this.
- Parent company doesn't have a blog, but child company does on its domain/subdomain
This is not a great strategy, as it dilutes your child company's website potential and creating links from your parent company to your child company will result in problems down the road. Google will find this connection sooner or later, and penalties may (will) result.
- Parent company doesn't feature a blog, but child company does on its website
This is a slightly better outcome - the child company maximizes its ranking and traffic potential but the parent company is left in the lurch. This can create problems as the parent company should be represented alongside the child company.
- Both websites feature unique blogs on their respective domains
This is really the ideal scenario. It keeps both companies separated (so no risk of penalties) but also allows them to maximize their ranking and traffic potential. This is what I strongly suggest if you want to be successful without risking long-term damage to your websites.
To answer your question directly:
#3 or #4 above are the options I would consider to maximize traffic to your domain. #4 has the added benefit of helping out the parent company, although if you don't have any say in what they do, it may not be possible.
Hope this helps and let me know if you have any further questions.
All the best,
Rob
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
-
No descripton on Google/Yahoo/Bing, updated robots.txt - what is the turnaround time or next step for visible results?
Hello, New to the MOZ community and thrilled to be learning alongside all of you! One of our clients' sites is currently showing a 'blocked' meta description due to an old robots.txt file (eg: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt) We have updated the site's robots.txt to allow all bots. The meta tag has also been updated in WordPress (via the SEO Yoast plugin) See image here of Google listing and site URL: http://imgur.com/46wajJw I have also ensured that the most recent robots.txt has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools. When can we expect these results to update? Is there a step I may have overlooked? Thank you,
Technical SEO | | adamhdrb
Adam 46wajJw0 -
I have a sub domain that has live content on it but the root domain redirects to another URL. I know this is not great but what are the implications?
I have a subdomain that is populated and has content. The root domain that the sub lives on redirects to an entirely different URL. I am trying to make a case as to why this isn't great besides the fact that it is just weird user experiences. What are the SEO implications etc. Would any equity that gets built up on the subdomain get passed along in the redirect? Or will there be indexation issues with Google? Cheers, Mark
Technical SEO | | mjsikorsky0 -
How to optimize for new subdomain when root domain has all link juice and built up authority?
We recently took control of a root domain for a business that was not doing e-commerce. They just had a single page business card website at the root domain. However, it had been around long enough to have built up some amount of domain authority and link juice. When we took over to enable the site with e-commerce, we redirected the root domain to point to a www subdomain where the store is now located. Now, in my seomoz campaign, i see that all the link juice and authority stats are in the root domain metrics, and the subdomain we are tracking has nothing. What is the best way for me to take advantage of all the built up authority for the root domain to help with the newly enabled ecommerce site at the subdomain? or am I basically starting from scratch since i have been reading that link juice does not flow as well from root domains to subdomains. thank you and happy new year to all!
Technical SEO | | devinjy0 -
Blog Ranking NOT home page main website?!
Hi, Our Blog (http://blog.thailand-investigation.com) is ranking for some of our major keywords but not our home page (http://www.thailand-investigation.com)!? Our blog is WordPress and our main website is HTML. It seems like the search engines consider that they are 2 separate websites!? When I check the incoming links to our website, I get also the blog links!!!??? Is it normal? Do I have to build a relation of some kind or write some code saying that it is our Blog... I don't know! I'm not a SEO specialist or even a webmaster. I'm a small business owner and take care on my website. I created by myself but never learned! So, please help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | MichelMauquoi0 -
Redirecting blog.<mydomain>.com to www.<mydomain>.com\blog</mydomain></mydomain>
This is more of a technical question than pure SEO per se, but I am guessing that some folks here may have covered this and so I would appreciate any questions. I am moving from a WordPress.com-based blog (hosted on WordPress) to a WordPress installation on my own server (as suggested by folks in another thread here). As part of this I want to move from the format blog.<mydomain>.com to www.mydomain.com\blog. I have installed WordPress on my server and have imported posts from the hosted site to my own server. How should I manage the transition from first format to the second? I have a bunch of links on Facebook, etc that refer to URLs of the blog..com format so it's important that I redirect.</mydomain> I am running DotNetNuke/WordPress on my own IIS/ASP.Net servers. Thanks. Mark
Technical SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0 -
What Parts Of Domain Registration Change Affect Rank
Could changing one's physical address for a domain or going from public to private registration have a negative affect on rank? Other factors? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 945011