I have a blog on a sub domain, would you move it to the rood domain in a directory?
-
I have a blog that preforms fairly well on a sub domain, but after reading a post that Rand made to the Q & A I am thinking about moving it to the main domain in a sub directory. What are your thoughts on this? Here are some stats on it. The blog currently gets about 5 x the traffic of the main domain. The domain is older, 2008 creation date. They pretty much register for the same keywords.
-
Thanks guys, you have pretty much confirmed what I thought. It looks like I have a fun weekend ahead of me redirecting and testing things out. But it will be a good notch to add to see how the traffic goes.
One thing I wanted to ask about, this is not the case in my instance, but would the recommendation be the same if the subdomain had a higher PR than the naked domain?
-
I have always hosted blogs in a subfolder. The reason is I want all the traffic to stay in one place, along with all the link juice. True, a blog on a subdomain may get viewed as two separate entities, and therefore have multiple chances to show up in Google, but I like to have the look, and PR all attached to one specific place.
Personally, I have never seen the benefit of having a blog hosted on a subdomain. It always made more sense to have all your eggs in one basket and to keep feeding your TLD instead of spreading out your efforts.
Here is an article I generally refer to for advice: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-or-subfolders-which-are-better-for-seo/6849/
Like EGOL said "If you want your blog to be treated as part of the domain then put it on the domain. If you want your blog to be treated like a separate domain then put it on a separate domain."
-
Thanks for elaborating. But what we're debating may prove something else entirely. It seems weird, but it's a very smart dumb machine.
-
Google repeatedly changes their mind about some things.
They have repeatedly changed their mind about subdomains.
At some times in the past they treated subdomains exactly like they were part of the root domain. At other times they treated them like a separate site and they have been in the middle some times too I am sure.
If you want your blog to be treated as part of the domain then put it on the domain. If you want your blog to be treated like a separate domain then put it on a separate domain. By doing this you will always be right.
But, if you place it on a subdomain then I am betting that you will be wrong about 1/2 of the time - if you are lucky.
-
Personally, I've never put a blog on a sub. More people are saying there isn't any difference, but more people may be saying that because a few more have said as such. Lovely how that works?
It was about four years ago we were told that EMDs were losing their potency. Upon hearing that, I jumped right on the bandwagon. Bad move, at least for a little bit. It would be years before a non-EMD, all things equal, could easily compete with an EMD.
What is said and what is are often at chronological odds.
Are you talking about this post?
Perhaps a new URL for the same pages could cause the Googles to 'reconsider' the content, for better or worse. Hopefully it would be for the better. I think you're going to do it anyway, so please take notes. It has the makings of a post I would love to read.
-
thinking about moving it to the main domain in a sub directory. What are your thoughts on this?
If this was my site I would move it to /blog/ (or a folder with another name) immediately and use 301 redirects.
All of my blogs are in a folder on the main domain.
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
-
Is this a Risky Blog Move?
I have a client who's thinking of placing their blog on a separate domain because the plug-ins and various other functionality is becoming bulky and slowing things down for the main site. There will be a 'Blog' link on the company's website navigation, just as there is now, that will take people to the blog. As an SEO person, this seems like a bad idea, even if we set up 301s from all the old posts to all the new ones. In my research I came across these two points: All backlinks to blog posts contribute directly to a website’s OVERALL SEO strength because those backlinks are pointing to your main domain. Removing them may reduce overall link juice to the site. Simply having fewer content pages on the site will cause entire site to rank lower because Google loves content-rich authority sites. Does anyone know this to be true for sure? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Caro-O
~Caro0 -
Will adding a mini directory to our blog with lots of outgoing no follow links harm our authority and context
We are an adventure travel tour company, who run hiking, kayaking, biking adventures in several countries. We have a travel tour operator website with a blog in a sub folder of the site. We want to add a section/category in the blog itself with a hiking club mini directory, that lists all hiking clubs in 1 or 2 specific countries. The reason we want to do this is because the people searching online for these clubs are our target market and potential clients. We hope to rank for some of these searches, and encourage interest in our blog/website in the process. We also want the potential to build relationships with these clubs. The question I want to ask is: if we add say 100 to 200 listings, and make all outgoing links no follow, will this harm our page authority, reputation with SE's or pose any other risk for our site. The other question is, do you think that this will dilute the context of our content - as its slightly different in context to the rest of our site content. Are we better to set up a separate site for this purpose.
Technical SEO | | activenz1 -
Duplicate blog URLs in Magenton
On one my sites Moz is picking up 4483 duplicate content pages. The majority of these are from our blog and video sections on our site. We're using a URL shortener and it appears that some of the pages are the full version of the URL then the shortened version. However if you go to the full version you get redirected to the shorter one. So I would assume that the Moz crawler should get the same redirect? We're also getting pagination being shown as duplicate pages, which I would half expect, but the URLs Magento is creating are truly bizarre: e.g http://www.xxx.com/uk/blog/cat/view/identifier/news/page/news/index.php/alarms-doorbells/?p=2 Alarms and doorbells is one of our product categories, which is displayed in the LHN on the blog page but has nothing to do with the blog itself. On another site on the same Magento instance, with the same content (they're for two different regions) we're show as having 248 duplicate pages, again in the video and news section, but this is a completely different scale of issue. Has anyone else encountered issues like these? I'm probably going to put a noindex in place on these two sections until we can get a solution in place as we're completely unranked in google on this site. Thanks
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Pointing a sub-domain to a sub-folder in htaccess
I have a client who currently uses shopify for there blog. I want to set them up with a separate blog away from the shopify system and host it in Australia. I know the best option is using a subfolder but as the shopify system is an unmoveable CMS can I somehow point my subdomain to a subfolder and get the benefits of the domain name? I could do this by using the rewrite rule in the htaccess file. If I was to do this would it end up cloaking the URL's of the articles?
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
Why is there duplicates of my domain
When viewing crawl diagnostics in SEOmoz I can see both "www.website.com" and a truncated version "website.com" is this normal and why is it showing (I do not have duplicates of my site on the server)? E.g.: http://www.klinehimalaya.com/
Technical SEO | | gorillakid
http://klinehimalaya.com/0 -
Domain tld question
Hi all, I have a question regarding the ranking of exact match tld which is co.uk Currently I have a .com domain with PR of 3 and the problem is that it have one word in front of my desired keyword, so it's not exact match. I have managed to buy an exact match but it's co.uk The questions are: Will a co.uk rank better for UK than .com domain I am reading at SEOMOZ that exact match domain value is getting lower, so is it worth to redirect my current .com domain to co.uk just to get rid of that one word and start all over again with exact match. Thanks
Technical SEO | | VasilTasev0 -
Old Domain - What to do?
A client recently bought an older domain that is keyword-rich to an aspect of his company. The main website has both e-commerce and call-to-action elements. Our team is split on whether or not to create a micro-site on that domain focused on that aspect of the work that he does or to simply redirect the old domain to his main website. I have not had the opportunity to look at the link profile of the recently acquired domain nor do I have any idea of how many times it's changed hands (which would seem to now be a possible indicator of doorway pages). If any clarification would help, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer.
Technical SEO | | MountainMedia0 -
Redirect Multiple Domains
This is a follow-up question from one posted earlier this month. I can't linked to that because it's a private question so I'm trying to summarize it below. We have a number of domains – about 20 - (e.g. www.propertysharp.com) that point to our main domain ip adress (www.propertyshark.com) and share the same content. This is no black-hat strategy whatsoever, the domains were acquired several years ago in order to help people who mistyped the websites url to reach their desired destination. The question was whether to redirect them to our main domain or not. Pros were the reportedly millions of incoming links from these domains - cons was the fact that lots of issues regarding duplicate content could arise and we actually saw lots of some pages from these domains ranking in the search engines. We were recommended to redirect them, but to take it gradually. I have a simple question - what does gradually mean - one domain per week, per month?
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0