Brining a blog back into the fold

Thinking about 301ing blog site back to main site

[neo schmeichel]

The company that I work for set up a blog site on a different domain before I started working here. For a few months they paid a content writer to keep cranking stuff out for it, but eventually management decided that creating so much content provided poor ROI for our ecommerce business. Most of the traffic the blog sent to the main site (it sent a great deal of deep links to the main site) didn't end up converting, and the demographic that we target isn't all that tech savvy--i.e. they're not a bunch of webmasters in the habit of linking from their blogs and websites and passing page rank, trust rank, visitors, etc. Eventually, the blog achieved a PR of 4, but now that it's not going to be kept up as frequently it's going to be of less marketing value, and it's pretty much tapped out as far as passing PR value back to the mother ship (PR5).

Given that there isn't much more value to be squeezed out of the current situation (as a result of a lack of corporate commitment to keep providing new content), I'm wondering if there might be any benefit to 301ing the blog site back to a directory in the main
site, which would serve as a new host for all the old content. I think I would 301 the homepage to a mysite.com/articles.html type of landing page, and 301 all the articles to their own pages in an /articles/ directory.

As far as general usability benefits go, the main site has very little content, so the content generated at the blog site would probably add value to our customers, as it would be easier for them to stumble across while browsing our site. We may continue to add an article or post here or there, but I don't foresee adding major new informational content in the near future.

As far as SEO goes, there seem to be two potential benefits: First, our main site would benefit from all the external links pointing at the blog. We might lose some link juice from the deep links pointing back to the main site, but I half suspect that these links have been discounted pretty heavily already, as there are so many pointing back to the same domain. Second, it might be easier to justify a link-building campaign to the management, as the links would be coming directly back into our newly-content-rich site rather than being filtered through an external site.

I know there are differing opinions about this, so I'm wondering what you all have to say about it.

[Robert Charlton]

neo - I think you've answered your own question.

Multiple links from the blog to your main site are going to be nearly as helpful as individual links from multiple external sites would be. So, if your blog isn't driving worthwhile traffic, it's of limited use... and 301ing it might be just the thing to do.