Blog URL - subdomain or directory?

[kmayer]

Greetings,

We are setting up a wordpress blog on our server. From an SEO standpoing, is blog.domain.com better or domain.com/blog?

[tedster]

As far as ranking goes, it's really not going to matter in my view. A few years ago, subdomains were treated more like a separate website by Gogole, but not today. The slightly shorter URLs that you can get by using a subdomain might help to get the full page name displaying in the SERPs and that might help click-through just a bit when a UTL does rank - but that's about all I can see and it's just a slim potential traffic difference, not a ranking difference.

So it's not worth any agonizing - just pick one and then develop as technically sound a system as you can muster.

[bferriolo]

kmayer - i don't post often or much at all, but I just went through this progression. What I finally had to do was ask myself why was I doing it? Was it for Google or for my users. I realized real quick how clear my intentions had become. I created a word press blog that was buy.widgets.com, I did this because the direction of the wind/week for the Google know it all's was sub domains carry more weight. Why and for what reason? Does it carry more weight because you attach it to your homepage and let it reap the rewards you have already worked so hard to achieve? Don't know. What I do know is flipping my customers from one to the other caused a higher bounce rate. I also found myself trying to work as hard keeping the sub domain new and fresh with content as I was the main domain. This started to seem a little counter productive. I then took the time to walk into the restroom, face the mirror and ask that oh so tough question, why am I doing this? Is it to game the so called system or was it to provide a user experience that was like no other? I answered that with, how quick can I unwind this mess, redirect what I had done already and have one killer, kick butt site. Ask your self that 1 simple question and your answer should be very clear. This is not to say there isn't a need for sub domains, I'm just saying to ask your self that question in regards to your business, your customers, and your livelihood which you know better than anyone.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Trick question? My suggestion would be neither, put the blog in your root directory and use it as a content management system for the rest of the site. There's nothing saying ALL pages have to be either blog or non blog in any given directory, they play well together.

I don't like seeing "blog" in a url, either before or after the domain name, it's a waste of space and you'll never rank well for "blog" anyway.

The fewer site-wide repeating words in your url's the better.

[ianemv]

What's the content of the main directory btw?

It will be better to plan your website as early as possible. As for domain/directory, tedster was right. Google does not treat a sub-domain as another site. For me, i like the idea of keeping everything in the root directory.

Why do you have to put in sub-directory btw? (In case you choose sub-dir) Do you plan to put other features such as, domain.com/forum, domain.com/stuff?

Last words, subdomain or subfolder doesn't really matter to search engines now. I also agree with bferriolo, you should really know what will be the end product of your site? I hope it will not be run by your subdomain or directory.

[kmayer]

Thanks for the input all. The main website is already on a content management system. The main website deals with providing a service to businesses within a certain geography. Let’s say that service is to build a custom widget for the business. On that website, we currently have a document that people can request to download via a simple form that deals with what a business needs to do to make sure that they either currently have a great custom widget in their possession, or if they are in the market to have one built, what they need to do to end up with the best possible product. Frankly, the main reason to move it from a downloadable PDF to a blog is to gain some backlink power. Do you think that is misguided or not beneficial enough to justify the effort?

[aakk9999]

@tedster

A few years ago, subdomains were treated more like a separate website by Gogole, but not today.

I did not know this - do you know this from testing or did Google/MC announced this somewhere?

Sorry to digress a bit from the OP theme

<added> How would this then reflect on PR of the subdomain and on and how often the subdomain is crawled?
</added>

[tedster]

I know this from sites I currently work with, as well as communications from Matt Cutts. The beginning of this evolution was at the end of 2007 [mattcutts.com].

How would this then reflect on PR of the subdomain

PR is calculated for each PAGE (really, for each URL), so there is no such thing as the PR of a domain or subdomain.

[aakk9999]

@ tedster,

Thanks for MC blog post link. I was just wondering whether all is really the same from SEO perspective between subdomain and folder.

When I mentioned PR, I meant in the site crawling terms, sorry I wasn't clear enough. Because one of potential differences between subdomain and folder that I can see could perhaps be in crawling depth?

For example, if PageRank helps with the depth at which Google crawls a site, then wouldn't creating a folder on the existing site (with existing backlinks and let's say a reasonable PR) be better than creating a new subdomain which will have to build its own PR? Or will subdomain also "inherit" crawling depth because of the main domain PR?

Another difference is perhaps when Google displays "Show more results from www.example.com" as well as when a domain has a double (indented) entry in SERPs. I find that both, "show more results.." and double entry catch visitor's attention better than having two aligned entries one after another.

I have not yet seen double entry nor 'show more results' in SERPs where one of them is from a different subdomains but in the same domain - would this still work if there is subdomain and domain ranking on the same page?

<added>
And just thought of another one - sitelinks. If a new addition is in the folder within the main domain, then a link to a page(s) the folder may appear as a sitelink or a mini sitelink (depending on site structure). I may be wrong here but I have not yet seen subdomain appearing as a sitelink.
</added>

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

PR is calculated for each PAGE (really, for each URL)

Not only that but PR isn't calculated solely by incoming links either, number of times visited relative to other pages Google deems similar seems to play a role too. Sticky social media pages can jump up in rank quickly lately even without incoming links.

I just wanted to add that you will want to carefully consider the effects adding a blog will have on the overall site. You don't want the blog dominating your other content if the other content is where your earnings are. How you set up your link structure plays a huge role in which pages rank best on your site. You knew that but read up on internal link structure before deciding what's best for your site.

[tedster]

I work with one site where one of its sitelinks IS a subdomain. And when it comes to crawl depth, it seems to be a lot like PR circulation - it seems to be based on links or click distances, an not on URL structures.

So when I say that the difference between a subdomain and a subdirectory seem to have vanished on Google, I'm not exaggerating.

[goodbyedee]

A few years ago, subdomains were treated more like a separate website by Gogole, but not today.

for at least 3 sites of mine which have a blog in subdomain, google treats them as separate sites. Specifically, for certain keywords i see the main site ranking first and the blog second... The sites are quite old so i suppose it can't be an issue of indexing...

[tedster]

Yes, you can still see this - especially on very focused query terms where there is not a lot of depth available for Google to build a more diverse SERP around. But that kind of SERP is usually not the target when launching a blog, so I didn't mention it in my earlier response.

[fabulousyarn]

Hey all - I was just trying to find out about this too - my main concern is hosting a php wordpress site (read/hackable) on my main server - so I thought, ok, perhaps do the blog on a sep server, make the main (income producing) site more secure, etc. Do you think this is a valid concern? I could take down a subdomain on a server faster, I guess, but I am just a little scared from a hack that happenned once a long time ago. I need the blog page to post easily about all kinds of knitting and yarn projects and events, within a yarn ecommerce site, and yarn fanatics LOVE blogs and LOVE to post on blogs. I thought about setting it up with google friend connect, etc, but that seems more labor intensive. Any thoughts?

[tedster]

You're right that penalties against subdomains do not always migrate against the main domain, but they almost always do migrate the other way around. I also think (just a guess) that a separate IP address for the subdomain is an extra layer of prophylaxis.

So there's another plus for the subdomain solution.