Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Blog.mysite.com or mysite.com/blog?
-
Hi, I'm just curious what the majority think of what's the best way to start a blog on your website for SEO benefits. Is it better to have it under a sub domain or a directory? Or does it even matter?
-
From everything I've read, I agree that your safest bet is to go with the subfolder.
-
I agree with Tim and Adam and that said, sub-folders are better as a general rule of thumb for sure.
You might also want to refer to other similar questions here on SEOMOZ.
-
http://www.seomoz.org/q/blogs-are-best-when-hosted-on-domain-subdomain-or* http://www.seomoz.org/q/setting-up-a-company-blog-subdomain-or-new-url* http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-vs-blog
and the post from Matt Cutts as well as the article from Rand that Adam mentioned.
-
-
I think Adam has hit the nail on the head. We recently moved our blog site from a subdomain to a subfolder and 301'd all the old URL’s with the intention that any entries that users find genuinely useful or interesting will be potentially linked to, thereby providing a benefit to the root domain.
As long as your blog is tightly related to your core business activity then I would go down the subfolder root although, in all honesty, I think subdomains potentially look a little more professional.
-
Hi Tim,
I generally prefer to go with the subfolder option (mysite.com/blog) rather than the subdomain (blog.mysite.com). The reason I prefer this option is because having the blog in a subfolder means that it will benefit from the value of the root domain. In other words, links that are obtained by the root domain will pass that value to the subfolders. However, a subdomain is treated as a separate site and therefore not much value is passed via the root.
Rand provides an excellent answer in a previous Q&A of a similar topic:
Hope that helps,
Adam.
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
-
Should I redirect a popular but irrelevant blog post to the home page?
Hi. I'm trying to get my website; www.ciphr.com , to rank for keywords relevant to "HR Software" in the UK. It's a highly competitive industry and we rank ~mid to low on page one for some of our ideal keywords that are highly relevant and high volume. Years ago we took the decision to blog about topics more loosely related to the world of work. One of our blog posts, about plants in the office https://www.ciphr.com/advice/plants-in-the-office/ is popular. It gets decent traffic and consistently builds backlinks to the post without any further effort on our part. The specific page has a PA of 46 and DA of 55 with >500 domains linking to it. This compares to our home page with a PA of 47 and 700 linking domains. It is typically the home page that ranks for our money keywords "HR Software" "HR Systems" in the UK. Because this blog post is so loosely related to our actual business, the traffic it generates is highly unlikely to turn into a customer of ours. I am considering redirecting the blog post to the home page to pass link juice to the home page. The concern I have is that, based on the anchor text and contextual signals from linking pages, Google might then infer that our home page is less relevant for our money keywords and more relevant for "plants". Are my concerns unfounded? What are your thoughts? Should I redirect the blog post to the home page? Another internal page? Keep the blog post live? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson19922 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Is it OK to include name of your town to the title tag or H1 tag on a blog to enhance local search results
I recently attended a webinar by ETNA Interactive on local search SEO. The presenter recommended including the name of your town in the title of the blog to increase local search SEO. Is this OK? Ive always been concerned that it is such an obvious attempt to rank locally that Google would consider it "spammy" ? black hat, "sketchy" or otherwise manipulative. Have the rules changed? Is it OK to do? Brooke
On-Page Optimization | | wianno1680 -
How to overcome blog page 1, 2, 3, etc having no or duplicate meta info?
As the above what is the best way to overcome having the same meta info on your blog pages (not blog posts) So if you have 25 blog posts per page once you exceed this number you then move onto a second blog page, then when you get to 50 you then move onto a 3rd blog page etc etc So if you have thousands f blog pages what is the best method to deal with this rather than having to write 100s of different meta titkes & descriptions? Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | webguru20141 -
What is the right schema.org link for a web design / developer / mobile agency?
It seems strange that a group of web developers would make up an entire structured language to designate businesses by category and somehow forget to include companies like.... web developers. So I must be missing it, what is correct to use?
On-Page Optimization | | yeagerd0 -
How do i block an entire category/directory with robots.txt?
Anyone has any idea how to block an entire product category, including all the products in that category using the robots.txt file? I'm using woocommerce in wordpress and i'd like to prevent bots from crawling every single one of products urls for now. The confusing part right now is that i have several different url structures linking to every single one of my products for example www.mystore.com/all-products, www.mystore.com/product-category, etc etc. I'm not really sure how i'd type it into the robots.txt file, or where to place the file. any help would be appreciated thanks
On-Page Optimization | | bricerhodes0 -
WordPress and category/subcategory landing pages
Hey, Here's my situation. I'm building a WordPress blog for product reviews of a certain niche. Current category setup is 4 main categories with 4-8 subcategories each. Each subcategory has a unique description that will help it become a landing page for certain keywords, after which it lists the posts from that subcategory. The posts will always be assigned to a sub-category, never to a main category. My issue is what to do with the main categories. They're fairly general so they're not really targeting any keywords, and don't have any unique descriptions attached to them. I was thinking of choosing between three options on designing the main category pages: List the subcategories + normal posts loop that bring the latest posts from the subcategories (may create a lot of duplicate content since the subcategory pages are also listing their posts) List only the subcategories (+ maybe just the latest post from each subcategory) Don't link the main categories at all, instead only use them to create dropdowns for the subcategories So, what would you choose, and why?
On-Page Optimization | | mihaiaperghis0 -
301 redirect (www.domain.com/index to www.domain.com)
Hello, Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with: www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com without creating an infinite loop. Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ? btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ? thanks a lot !
On-Page Optimization | | eyepaq2
