Will a blog at mydomain.com/v/blog help SEO?
-
Volusion doesn't allow messing with the main directory so I could only put a page at /v/blog. They do allow you to set up a 301 redirect so I had set up a 301 redirect from www.mydomain.com/blog to www.mydomain.com/v/blog. Is it worth starting a blog like this for SEO?
Thanks
-
Indeed, the general consensus seems to be to host a blog at eg. mydomain.com/blog
Depends on the purpose of the blog really, plus the relevance to the main website. Sometimes a subdomain is the better option.
RE. a 301 Redirect from mydomain.com/blog to mydomain.com/v/blog it will make very little if any difference on the SEO side, so long as any inbound links to your blog to go straight to the actual location rather than through a redirect (thus not loosing any link juice through the redirect).
On the Usability side, the /v/ directory will likely be confusing to some people as to what it actually means, they won't know the reasons for it being there.
So likely no direct issue on the SEO side, however may put a few people off on the Usability side.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
-
Great article and I am very motivated to make a killer blog. From what i've read on SEOmoz it looks like the best place for the blog is on the same domain. Ideally i'd have it at mydomain.com/blog, but due to Volusion constraints I have to put the blog at mydomain.com/v/blog and add a 301 redirect from mydomain.com/blog to mydomain.com/v/blog. Is this a bad thing, or is it just fine since the blog is in the domain?
Thanks
-
Hi there
To answer your specific question, "Is it worth starting a blog like this for SEO?" :
When contemplating starting a blog, it's imperative to really consider just how much resource will be required to regularly post new content to the blog and to moderate and engage with the readers of your blog.
All to often, a blog is started with great intention however soon becomes too much to maintain and starts to dry up.
- A blog with regular high quality posts that gain a lot of readership, comments and sharing can provide some SEO benefits to the main site that it supports, if setup and run in a professional way.
You'll find a really insightful blog post here on SEOmoz from July this year, it's entitled: "Blog Design for Killer SEO - Infographic" and is by Cyrus Shepard. It includes an awesome Infographic with full explanations of all 15 points covered. Well worth a read, is probably just what you're after.
However before embarking down the path of creating a blog, ensure that the resource is there to make it a sustainable blog that will add value and gain readership through high quality content.
I hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
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 it important for SEO that YouTube and Google + be used under the same Google Account?
Hello - I have a client that has their Google Plus and YouTube under separate Google accounts. My thoughts are that it'd be best for SEO and awareness with Google that their active YouTube channel to be under their active Google Plus account. My question is: Is it recommended for SEO that we upload the videos to her prominent Google business account (they only have about 100 subscribers)? If we did this we would delete them from the other account to avoid dup. content. We are in a position where we can make this change easily if it is recommended and good for SEO--which I would think it would be. So we would like to know now if we should make this change before we grow the YouTube channel further, or if we should leave it how it is. Any insight would be very helpful! Thank you!
Social Media | | dirigodev0 -
Please help me improve this link building strategy
Link building is challenging. Can you guys read my process below and offer improvements: This is for marketing an article that is good for target websites for humanitarian reasons. It helps their readers in a way that they really need it. Not to say that all of these target websites are going to want to reference my article. I'm looking for A. The target website to write, or let us write, a blog post around my article, of course with a link to the article and no other links to my website (unless they want to) or B. For our article to be listed in a resource section when appropriate How I'm doing this now: 1. We're starting with a well written, authoritative article with attractive images, graphs, and even a fancy javascript display area that's useful. The article is 3500 words. There's a big image link at the bottom that goes to the article in PDF version. Due to some hosting problems, the pdf version is disallowed in the robots.txt (it won't help to get links to it) There's 2 versions of the article, the one I'm marketing has all of our ecommerce menu and such removed, so that this version has minimal commercial parts in it. There's also a commercial version, which we are not pushing, and the non-commercial is rel cononicaled pointing over to the commercial. The non-commercial article has only one external backlink so far, and the commercial version has no external backlinks yet. We're just getting started. 2. First I like on facebook and follow on twitter. I spend some time with the target site's facebook page and like several recent posts, sharing one or two things to my own facebook page. I then retweet two good recent tweets put out by the site's general twitter account. BTW, we don't have very many twitter followers yet for our twitter account. 3. Then I read their newest blog post. I read it thoroughly. Sometimes I don't pick the newest if there is another recent one that is more similar in topic to our site. I spend some time putting together a thoughtful and helpful comment for that blog post. I submit the comment. I then go on FB and carefull post how I found the blog post helpful and place a link to their blog post. A lot of these sites, though, aren't accepting blog post comments but I always post on their facebook page. 4. I wait a couple of days in case my activity gets noticed. At that point, I go to linkedin and look for people that work for the site. If I find a content/marketing director, or if it's a small site and I find the owner [still not very good at this part], I search google for their email address and/or twitter account. I'm successful in finding a specific person only about 1/3 of the time. These sites also often have phone numbers. 5. I send out either A. a tweet to a specific person asking if they need help with content, or B. An email to a specific person like: Subject: Do you need help with content that is very useful to [niche audience] [their first name] I hope you are doing well. [add sentence here referencing something I learned about them, I don't know how to do this part well yet] I'm writing you because we have some content that is useful and important to [niche audience]. It's an article about [our article name and link]. We're wondering if you'd consider, since it would be very beneficial to your audience, to write a blog post explaining and citing that article. We think our doing this would add to [niche audience] quality of life. Sincerely, Bob Weikel
Social Media | | BobGW
Co-owner
[website] If I don't find a specific person, I write an email as similar to the above as possible and send it to their general email address or contact form. I send one email, wait 2 or 3 business days, send another email, wait 2 or 3 business days. Then I call. I ask for "Marketing" or whoever is in charge of their blog [I haven't done much of this and am not good at it yet] or if it's a small company I might talk to the owner. Sometimes I only send one email before calling, especially if I think email's a lost cause. I never leave voicemail. I always keep calling over several days until I reach someone. When I call and get someone, I say something like, "Hi, I'm Bob from [website]. I was wondering if you would be interested in some content that would be beneficial to [niche audience]." I know there is a lot of room for improvement. I'm looking for a 10% success rate. Thanks.1 -
Are Social Links on Home Page Good for SEO
Hi, I have removed the Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and G+ links from the top of our home page so as to try and stop users leaving the page. Is this bad for SEO? Thanks
Social Media | | Studio330 -
Blog posts copied to Facebook or Linked? Any Duplicate Content Issues?
I wasnt able to find any good answers on this. I have two separate ecommerce websites, one with a top level blog. (www.xyz.com/blog) and different website with a subdomain blog (blog.xyz.com)***note on the subdomain blog, although it links to our website. You cannot directly shop from it. Until i can make some sort of scraper, its what I have to work with. For quite some time now I have been copying the blog posts and re-creating them on facebook as a Note. Using the same anchor text/links on facebook as my blog post. Part of the issue is that I want the facebook pages to have some content and not just links. Both get 2-3 updates per week, 1 of those being a blog re-post. Does anyone know if google or bing considers this duplicate content? Should I simply link directly to the blog everytime, as a best practice? Any insight on this would be great. Thanks!
Social Media | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Is Pinterest's Embed a Pin good for SEO?
I was curious if by having Pinterest embed pins on my site will add SEO value... This would be used mainly on product pages for alternative images, closeup detail, any type of image to answer a customers question. I would accompany the pin with more text as another way of adding content to the page. Example on my site: Wicker Sofa product page with Pinterest Embed live. Also attached the screenshot of the code that is used by Pinterest pin embed widget. Hoping that extra unique content + social activity repins or follows, would help my store's SEO. Thank you for your answers in advance... 3uqUz57.png
Social Media | | wickerparadise0 -
Will we penalized for using social media contests to gain fans/followers in the future?
To help build up my company's website, we've been making a huge push in social media and to gain followers on our social pages, we've recently been running a couple of contests. So far it's been a great success - more traffic to the social media pages and more traffic to the website. We are considering making the contests a regular part of our social media & SEO strategy. In the past, our social media strategy has relied completely on "organic" likes (no incentives to follow our company's page) and posted content articles, pictures, etc. In the past month or so, we've began to use giveaway contests as a way to gain followers. Since focusing more on running contests, we've seen a huge increase in actively on our social media pages. We've continued to regularly post content articles, interesting pictures, etc, during the contests, but haven't see the same level of engagement that we do with the contest posts. Right now, it's looking like there is no down-side to running the contests as we're seeing an increase in traffic on the social pages, getting some additional traffic to posts and on our site, but before we start to completely commit to this strategy, I have a couple of questions: Is there a reason we shouldn't continue to run these contest to increase fans and interaction? How likely is it that Google will penalize us in the future for gaining followers through contests (instead of "organic" followers that followed us without an incentive)? There are some fans/followers that are serial contest entrants and are always entering a contest - could having too many of these fans raise a red flag for Google and the other search engines? How often is too often to be running a social media contest? Basically, I want to make sure that we are using social media as a long term SEO tool and are setting ourselves up to be successful in the future and not get penalized for gaining followers the wrong way. Any tips, strategies or advice is very much appreciated. Thank you!
Social Media | | airnwater0 -
Sorry! I am not understanding how a Re Tweet helps with any lift in rankings.
Does anyone have an infographic to explain how social media increases any lift in the SERP's. I just am not grasping how if I re tweet a link that the search enegines see this and say "this must be important" let rank it higher.. Where is the Social Media Moz Guru?
Social Media | | SEObleu.com0