Is my Company Blog Causing issues?
-
We have a company blog. IE companydomain.com/blog/. Much of the content is unrelated to what we do.
So why do we do it?
-
Cover local topics that our customers may be interested in and searching for. Get them in the back door so to speak.
-
Link bait, social sharing etc
-
Develop a marketing culture that's engaged always learning.
-
Customers get to know the people behind the company.
Here's my Pickle
If i sub domain or separate the site entirely, i won't benefit from all the juice we're generating.
If i keep the status quo, since much of the content isn't directly related to my "category", logic tells me that i could be diluting my website in Googles prying eyes.
Feedback PLEASE.
-
-
It's really hard to speak in generalities, but my gut reaction is that splitting to a subdomain is going to cause you more harm than good. You'll likely fragment your links and could very well harm your root domain. If the blog was clearly harming you somehow, that would be one thing, but to do this preventively is, IMO, a very bad idea.
I'd really rather see you focus on improving the quality of the blog and better integrating it into the main site. Keep the posts you have that have solid links and traffic, but work on cleaning up the rest. Especially focus on duplicate content and any issues that may be easy wins. Meanwhile, maybe make a move toward quality-over-quantity in 2013 and reappraise how the blog fits your broader business.
-
Hello Peter,
Thanks for the feedback. I've been working on pruning for a week now. The blog is huge in terms of content compared to the main site and will only get bigger. That's my concern. There are only so many blog posts you can write about screwdrivers right?
My gut is to limit the categories we write about and focus on quality, keeping it on the same domain BUT i'm nervous about dilution.
To Subdomain or not to Subdomain....THAT is the question.
-
What kind of content volume are you talking about? It's true that more content isn't always better, and you can dilute your index, but if you've got a main site with hundreds of pages and a blog with a couple hundred pages (and that blog is attracting links that strengthen the domain), I wouldn't worry too much. If you've got a 10-page main site and a blog with 10,000 posts then, yeah, that could cause your trouble. In that case, though, I'd bet content quality is also a problem.
If you separate the blog out, you're going to lose the impact of those social shares and links. Whatever you're losing now from dilution is going to be a fraction of what you lose if you split one of your main sources of links, I strongly suspect.
If your content is spinning out of control, is there a way to prune it down? Could you drop some of your oldest or least relevant content on the blog (with no links, shares, etc.)? Could you focus on more product-relevant content moving forward? There may be some happy mediums between just splitting it off or not splitting it.
-
Hi there, looking at the very purpose behind hosting the blog on the domain itself, it is good that the blog matches the theme of the domain not going completely off the track. As you said, if you make screwdrivers and your blog talks about home improvement, its perfectly alright as you are discussing about the topic that your product is intended for or can be used for and also you are discussing about a problem or an issue that your product can address or solve.
To conclude, you do not need to worry about anything regarding the blog till you don't get distracted from the theme of your domain. Having a forum or a blog hosted on the same domain is to talk about topics that are directly or indirectly related to the theme of your domain.
Regards,
Devanur.
-
Sorry again for disagreeing. I think the blog should be on the domain – yourdomain.com/blog
_And the blog should show some characters. I mean the blog should have Google Authorship implemented and should provide enough information about the author and active participation of the author. This is not a hit and run game. You need to write content that appeals targeted audience directly. And links will automatically come to you if the content is great, however needs a marketing push from your side; no need to chase the links by creating another domain. _
-
yep, i would stick to a particular subject matter for a site and focus on it.
-
Our blog does rank well. My concern is overall subject matter. If i look at webmaster tools...screw drivers are nowhere near the top works used. I'm afraid the blog may be diluting things....but it gets links to the domain, provides good content and traffic.
-
not necessarily, if you make the page specific to that keyword/topic and provide quality info you stand a chance to rank for it. Sites like about.com , ehow and wikipedia cover different topics and rank quite well . If you do address broad keywords in your blog, depending on the competition , you will have to build links specifically to that page for that specific keyword to rank high.
A downside to this : you might confuse the visitor if they land on that page and find out that your site covers a broad range of other topics that are of no interest for them . They will bounce off your site impacting your conversion rate.
-
So you feel a subdomain or new domain would be best.
What if you make screw drivers and your blog covers topics such as home improvement, architecture, insulation, home decor, paints, fabrics.
Is that too broad?
-
My thoughts would be to separate that blog from the main site or only have related content and posts in the blog to your subject matter. If your idea is to rank high for the site related to the Genre that your site is focused on, then that blog content is not helping. You can still blog about different topics as long as they resonate with a single theme for example home improvement, home renovation, home repair etc.
If the intent of the blog is to just engage the community and spread your brand as you mentioned then it's ok but you wont really be getting any SEO benefit from the blog. Your rankings would basically be impacted with the on and off site optimization done for the site related to the keywords. If your competitor has a site ranking well and also a blog related to that topic, he should outrank you in this instance.
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
-
301 Question - issue
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me. If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site. We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page. Why hasn't these pages been removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Solving pagination issues for e-commerce
I would like to ask about a technical SEO issue that may cause duplicate content/crawling issues. For pagination, how the rel=canonical, rel="prev" rel="next" and noindex tag should be implemented. Should all three be within the same page source? Say for example, for one particular category we may have 10 pages of products (product catalogues). So we should noindex page 2 onwards, rel canonical it back to the first page and also rel="prev" and rel="next" each page so Google can understand they contain multiple pages. If we index these multiple pages it will cause duplicate content issues. But I'm not sure whether all 3 tags need adding. It's also my understanding that the search results should be noindexed as it does not provide much value as an entry point in search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Bigcommerce & Blog Tags causing Duplicate Content?
Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole. Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts. Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues? I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
My client wants to rebrand their company including URL...
Hi all! An easy one for probably most of you. I have a client who wants to re-brand their business name and also match their URL to the new name. Their current domain name URL has been out there for over 5 years, and the site is performing quite well in search. Switching to a new URL will obviously be a very bad thing, but what are the options? newname.com redirect to the aged oldname.com, but when they are on the site, or when they find them in search, the oldname.com has nothing to do with the new brand. Or should we 301 every page of the oldname.com site to the newname.com be good enough? What is recommended? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Recommended SEO companies
I'm trying to find SEO companies to partner with. Are they any you can recommend that are near San Diego?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoniHicksAssociates0 -
Are tags an issue in SEO
SEOMoz saw that my tags were duplicate pages. Are tags a serious issue in SEO? Should I remove it entirely to prevent the duplicate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | visualartistics0 -
Optimizing the HomePage of a WordPress blog
Dearest SEOmozzers, I am creating WordPress blogs and I would like to know from a WordPress expert how to better optimize the homepage of a site. In particular, I'd like to know how to create an SEO-friendly homepage that I want to optimize for certain keywords. Do you think that it is better to show on the homepage the posts that I write, which change constantly, or a static, well-optimized text that will include the keywords I want to rank for? I have been naively using the changing posts, but after an analysis of the competitors I have noticed that most of them use a static text and show only the most recent post at the bottom of the page. I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know the best practice to adopt to optimize the site. Thank you. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Frame forwarding my blog
Hello again.. Last blog question for a while, I promise! 🙂 The annoying folk behind my website say that the only way for my blog to be at http://www.celynnenphography.co.uk/blog would be to frame forward it, because of how they are hosting, managing it etc Is this an acceptable and useful thing regarding SEO? (I want my website to benefit from my blog's content) Thanks a lot guys! Ioan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid0