How to best use our blog posts for SEO?
-
My company recently created a WordPress hosted blog. It is hosted completely separate from our company site. The primary domain for the blog is blog.mydomainname.com, but we immediately created a folder within our company website for www.mydomainname.com/blog that has a reverse proxy to the blog itself.
I'm curious though if we should consider taking the content from the blog posts and re-creating that within our company website as well? The blog posts are very good SEO rich content, and we always struggle to find new content to put on our company website as it is already.
Would like to get some folks thoughts on this.
Thanks!
-
Selfishly, this was a great thread to get involved with. Our domain can't handle a blog so we have to do it similar to how Mike does - and ours hasn't launched yet, so I got some good confirmations to work with so we maximize the opportunity as best possible given our limitations.
So, thanks for asking, Mike. And, thanks for answering, Dr. Pete!
-
Yep, www.mydomainname.com is the main site. Thanks for your help!
-
Oh, sorry - I thought the blog was on a separate domain and you were just setting the reverse proxy to change it from "blog.domain.com" to "domain.com/blog". In this case "www.mydomainname.com" is actually the main site, right?
Done right, that should work - as long as Google sees the blog as a sub-folder of the main domain, the physical separation across servers shouldn't matter much. People separate out servers for all kinds of legitimate reasons.
-
Thanks for the response! We did try and initially host the blog under the company website, but our CMS just couldn't support a blog that we were satisfied enough with to use. The powers that be that are controlling the blog decided to go with a Wordpress hosted blog. To try and still get as much SEO value as possible, I am in the process of setting up a reverse proxy from www.mydomainname.com/blog to the blog itself. My understanding is that this will allow the search engines to treat the blog as part of our overall website and still get the SEO content value from each blog post. I know it won't be quite as good as hosting it directly on the website, but I'm hoping this will be close.
I think I have decided to just advertise the blog on the home page of the company website, and NOT duplicate any of the blog posts.
-
I guess it depends on why this is on a separate domain at all. If you have the technical capacity to host the blog content under your company website, then in 95%+ of cases, I'd move the blog. Unless there's a clear need to brand a separate domain or legally separate the blog from the company website, having a separate domain is just splitting your authority. All the links that come to your blog are going to just funnel into 1 linking domain to your main site. If that content was on your main site, you'd have dozens or (down the road) hundreds of linking domains instead.
If it has to be separate, than I agree with Andrea - I wouldn't copy it. You're setting up duplicates and confusing your potential audience. In general, though, I'd want to understand why you made the split. Fully integrating them has much more bang for your buck, SEO-wise.
-
I'm working on something similar right now and have a few random thoughts: I'm not a fan of using the same content; aside from duplicate content issues (and nobody wants to deal with those messes), what's the value for end users? Why read the blog if it's going to be on the site? Or, why have a blog if you're going to put the same stuff (even if it's only some of it) on the site? Obvious, but for a successful blog it's critical.
Linking from the blog to the site, etc. makes a lot of sense for SEO/link juice and there's plenty of benefit there.
It's not a one-course-of-action scenerio. I've been building the business case for how we should handle ours since our site technology doesn't allow for hosting a blog. Sometimes it a bit of the lesser of the evils, but ultimately there's still plenty of good to get from it.
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
-
Website and seo for categories and pages
I have a website with a number of specific locations listed in a directory. The locations are in categories but i also have several pages with the same titles and descriptions. Will this be a problem when it comes to seo
On-Page Optimization | | twiguins0 -
Old Blog Posts
Every single day we publish articles that have a high amount of engagement onsite 50-300 comments. We have been running for around 8 years now and have a rather bloated database of old stale posts. We post advice on betting on sports. Not guides as such but tips for events. After the event has started the posts are outdated. What is your advice for these? These articles are not seen as "thin" but rather outdated. There is no way possible for me to update the content as such. Also out right deleting the content would go against our openness and transparency of past selections advised.
On-Page Optimization | | MrDeeBee0 -
Product Descriptions (SEO)
Hello, I sell products relating to wood. Although the products vary, I like to give description of the wood type for the customers who might not be familiar with it. Will it hurt my rankings to give the same descriptions for the same wood type as long as the majority of the description is different? Here is an example of the layout: 1. Different description for different products 2. The same short description for the same wood types (seen throughout multiple pages) Hopefully my question makes sense.
On-Page Optimization | | mattl992 -
Press Page Best Practices?
Hey Mozzers! I have a question that I haven't found a perfect answer to yet. The company I work for has built a press/awards/news article page and I'm trying to determine the best format to showcase the information in. (You can take a look at the page here: https://www.webpt.com/about/press Should I have our team copy and paste the press releases onto our site and rel canonical that post to the original article? Or would it be better to just have a short intro paragraph and then have a read full story link at the bottom of that paragraph. Final question--should I make these pages noindex, nofollow? Looking forward to hearing everyone's answers!
On-Page Optimization | | WebPT0 -
How does a collapsed section affect on page SEO?
A client recently asked me whether a tabbed collapsed section of text that is expanded (i.e. revealed) when clicked, is an OK thing to do without negatively effecting SEO. I told him that for starters, he may want to rethink why he would want to hide the text in the first place (this is not an FAQ type scenario). The reason has to do with the aesthetic of the page. Anyway, aesthetic aside, any thoughts on whether a collapsed (hidden from view) negatively affects on-page SEO? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | stephanwb
Stephan0 -
SEO can id and class be used in H1?
Can ID and class be used in my H1 tag. I realize best case would be to change it, but it's going to require a change order from the ecommerce company to fix their sloppy code. Will this hurt seo? Example:
On-Page Optimization | | K-WINTER0 -
SEO without CMS: Impossible?
Is WordPress the ONLY way to go for an SEO friendly website? Any REAL reason for using anything but?
On-Page Optimization | | EliteErikSEO0 -
Wordpress when to use posts or pages
Hi Guys, I have a network of EMD sites that currently use a homepage and then we have a blog page which has 5-6 posts on. Is this the best way to do it with sites under 10-20 pages? Or should we create say 3-4 new pages/categories and drop the posts relevant to each page/category in there? Thank you Jon
On-Page Optimization | | imrubbish0