Blog Setup
-
A client has been blogging for about a year on http://blog.abccompany.com/ and has a page authority of 37.
With it's built up past history, should we change the blog to a subdirectory, http://www.abccompany.com/blog ?
Obviously thinking what is the best long-term strategy / benefits.
Thanks, Chris
-
Thanks Alan.
I greatly appreciate the insight.
-
There's no single best answer here. Generally speaking, by consolidating the sub-domain into the root, each link pointing to the blog carries slightly more weight because it's feeding the blog AND the main site in a more direct manner. Traffic and organic clicks through to the blog also pass weight more cleanly (and thus with more strength) to the blog and main site as well.
A key factor however, is "What is the topical intent of the main site?" Is the main site an eCommerce site? The topical intent in this case is transactional. If that's the case, and since the blog's topical intent is informational, you may not see as much gain through consolidation compared to a situation where the main site's topical intent is also informational.
Unfortunately, there's no specific guarantee one way or the other in regard to the amount of impact merging transactional and informational content would have, given there are so many other factors weighed in SEO these days.
If you do migrate, be sure you get as close to 100% parity with implementing 301 redirects from the old blog URLs to the new blog URLs. That would be crucial. If the blog currently has an extremely high volume of organic traffic, and if the main site is transactional, I'd recommend leaving things as they are. If, however, the blog only has limited organic traffic, I'd recommend merging, and doing a full media push (press release, social drive, etc.) to let the world know, and immediately signal to the search engines that this change is a big deal, so as to ensure the most likelihood that any minor bleed-off from 301s is mitigated.
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
-
Infinite scroll blog
We're currently re-designing a website for our client, which includes an infinite scroll blog. When driving traffic to individual blog posts, is there a particular way to provide them with a unique URL to view the desired blog post? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SymbiontGroup0 -
Hosted Wordpress Blog creating Duplicate Content
In my first report from SEOmoz, I see that there are a bunch of "duplicate content" errors that originate from our blog hosted on Wordpress. For example, it's showing that the following URLs all have duplicate content: http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/ys/
Technical SEO | | TomHu
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/16/vendome-prize-website/gallery-7701/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/sm/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/26/top-ten-tips-to-mastering-the-twitterverse/unknown/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/bv/ They all lead to the various images that have been used in various blog posts. But, I'm not sure why they are considered duplicate content because they have unique URLs and the title meta tag is unique for each one, too. But even so, I don't want these extraneous URLs cluttering up our search results, so, I'm removing all of the links that were automatically created when placing the images in the posts. But, once I do that, will these URLs eventually disappear, or continue to be there? Because our blog is hosted by Wordpress, I unfortunately can't add any of the SEO plugins I've read about, so, wondering how to fix this without special plugins. Thanks!
Tom0 -
Does Having Links on this blog Hurt or Help?
Hello, I created a wordpress blog a while back, http://plastic-bins.com/ If you go into one of the pages on the blog (for example: http://plastic-bins.com/plastic-shelf-bins/ ) you will notice a link after the text/content telling you where you can purchase the stuff that is talked about on that page. There is one link back to the e-commerce site on every category page on the blog. Does anyone know if these links will help me or hurt me in terms of ranking in the SERPS? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
On-Page SEO of the SEOmoz Blog Section
Hey Everyone My brain isn't working (only had 1 cup of coffee so far - #2 on it's way) this morning and I could use some help. We're creating a blog on a site for a client of ours and I've been looking at the SEOmoz blog for best practices when it comes to the implementation of pagination, canonical tags and noindex. My questions: There is no use of the canonical tag on the main blog page or any of the paginated pages but it is being used on blog post pages. Why not use it on the main blog pages as well? I'm assuming because the blog pages are always changing with different content there is not much point? Paginated pages in the category sections i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1?page=2 are noindexed but paginated pages in the main blog section i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 are not. Is this because of a duplicate content concern since the posts in the category sections are in the main blog section as well? If that's the case, why wouldn't the main category page i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1 be noindexed as well? What's the reason for noindexing the "Show # Posts" pages i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog?show=5 ? I'm assuming another concern of duplicate content? Any insights into these questions would be greatly appreciated and would help with the implementation of our clients blog. Thanks, Ken
Technical SEO | | noBulMedia0 -
SEO value of an on-site hosted blog
We are in the process of upgrading our blogging capability. Our preference would be to host a Wordpress blog under our site url. However due to our technical set up we've found out that it isn't possible to put Wordpress onto our servers so we'll need to go with a hosted version. Does anyone have any idea or examples of how this could affect our SEO performance? Also - is Wordpress the best tool - seems to be the most popular! Thanks. Jon
Technical SEO | | TTS_Group0 -
Feedburner - Why Sending My Blog Posts A Day After I Post Them?
I have my feed setup through feedburner for my wife's blog ktlouise.com. Whenever she posts a new blog post, it doesn't get emailed to her subscribers until the next day. Does anyone know how to change this so that the updates go out the same day? Thanks for the help! REF
Technical SEO | | FergusonSEO0 -
I am using SEOmoz pro software and my blog tags are bringing up 404 errors.
After checking they do bring back a 404 page, so i am wondering what to do. Do i remove all the blog tags? We use a Drupal cms system.
Technical SEO | | AITLtd0 -
How do I add a blog to a subdirectory of a volusion store?
Based on what I've read so far, the best blog URL for SEO purposes is a subfolder (www.example.com/blog) rather than a subdomain (blog.example.com). I am having a lot of trouble adding a blog to our e-commerce store which is hosted by volusion. I have looked into installing Wordpress into a subdirectory but apparently Volusion does not allow the mysql/myphpadmin/database access needed to successfully do this. I have also looked into trying to publish my blog through ftp using Blogger, but they stopped allowing this a while ago. Does anyone know a way to add a blog to my volusion store's subdirectory? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AHH8880