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
-
What Happens If I migrate my Sandbox free website to a new domain? Will my rankings be affected?
Hey Mozzers! One of my sites recently got out of the Google sandbox period (cause it started to rank for keywords) but the problem is the old domain sounds kinda uncool. I then found a new domain with a very cool name so I want to migrate my old site to the new domain. So my question is will it affect my rankings on Google? Or will my new domain be sandboxed for another year? Please help me out fast.
Technical SEO | | zachis323431 -
Value of domain name for domain authority. Please help to figure out!
I am doing SEO for an appliance repair company. Their company website's domain doesn't have high authority, and I am going to increase that by link earning and content improving. I think a better domain name might also help me out. The current URL contain the word "appliance" but doesn't have "repair" in it. I am thinking a new domain that would contain both keywords will serve better. Could you please share with me your thought on this? Am I in the right direction, or not at all? I know Google penalizes mirror sites since this they are considered as duplicated content. I'll upload my content to the new domain and make the old one point to that new URL. I am wondering if canonical might help? Or 301 redirect will be a better solution? Any advise would be highly appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Will doing a 301 redirect for one domain to another give the latter domain the formers links?
I have some websites that I built a few years ago that are still in existence, but I no longer have access to the sites as they weren't hosted by myself. These sites all carry a "Designed by Me" text on the footer with a link to my (now old) website. I have since done 301 redirects on the domain names that are used in the footers of these sites so they link directly to my new site. However, will these websites now show up on Google Webmasters for example as external links to my site?
Technical SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
Wanted to shift a blog from sub domain to sub directory but...
Ok, I have a client who has their blog up and running on blog.website.com and they are planning to shift the blog to sub-directory www.websire.com/blog. The only problem is that the blog and website are hosted on two different servers so is there any way we can shift the blog to sub directory without shifting the blog to the similar server?
Technical SEO | | MoosaHemani0 -
Duplicate titles / canonical / Drupal
I have a site where there are several duplicate titles, looks like mainly based on a parameterized vs. non-parameterized version of the page. I have what appears to be a proper canonical tag, but webmaster still complains of both duplicate titles & meta descriptions. A good example (taken out of webmaster report for http://igottadrive.com) is: /driving-tips/mirror-setup-and-use /driving-tips/mirror-setup-and-use?inline=true If I look at the page (in either case) there appears to be a correct canonical tag pointing to the base case. However, for some reason google is either ignoring the canonical or its not properly done. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | uwaim20120 -
I have a site that has both http:// and https:// versions indexed, e.g. https://www.homepage.com/ and http://www.homepage.com/. How do I de-index the https// versions without losing the link juice that is going to the https://homepage.com/ pages?
I can't 301 https// to http:// since there are some form pages that need to be https:// The site has 20,000 + pages so individually 301ing each page would be a nightmare. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | fthead90 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0 -
Moving domain.com to subdomain.domain.com
Hi, I like to do something, but first like to take some opinions from seomoz. My question is: 1. I have a domain: brandtrends.com and i like to move this from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com because: brandtrends.com is on the position #15 on the second page of SERP for my "brand" keyword. I like to move it under trends.brand.com but all inbound-links are @brandtrends.com What do you thing, if i move permanently 301 from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com does it rank under brand.com on the 1st page of SERP..? like to rank trends.brand.com under brand.com on results page...!!! I have the backlinks of brandtrends.com on my hands too, should i leave the inbound links @brandtrends.com and the new ones i build with trends.brand.com or should i change the inbound links from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com Hope you got it! THanks
Technical SEO | | leadsprofi0