Blog on Main Site, New Site, or Sub-Domain of Site?

Which is Best for Overall Search Strategy?

[nzap]

I'm going to be creating 1 or 2 blogs. I haven't fully decided yet.

I know for certain that 1 blog will be for our company website, new product info, company news, promotions, tips on our product type, etc.

This is going to have the same design template as our main company site, which sells products online.

I'm not sure if I should host the blog at "companydomain.com/blog/" or if I should do "blog.companydomain.com".

Any suggestions? And why one vs. the other?

My thought was this: I should do mydomain.com/blog/ because it will grow our site's pages (by possibly 250 or so pages a year), thereby increasing the size and content of our site -- which search engines would like.

The other approach was to put it at blog.companydomain.com -- so that we benefit from the links that are generated pointing to our main site -- although then our main site may not show as having grown in content and # of pages since search engines see sub-domains as completely different sites.

Any ideas which is best?

In addition, If I have the time, I was going to create yet a 2nd blog, hosted at a completely different domain name that is more of a general blog within my product category, that sometimes links to my site and sometimes to other sites - and is a genuine information blog about my industry.

With that in mind, which should I do for my company blog?

Thank you in advance for any help!

[wheel]

If I can be a bit contrarian, I'd go with a completely seperate domain - strictly from an SEO perspective.

I don't think the domain makes much difference to the end user when it comes to blogs. But having two seperate domains can help diversify your traffic in the search engines.

The advantage putting it on a subfolder of your main domain would be that you would get the boost that comes with publishing on an established authority site instead of a new unestablished domain.

[nzap]

Well, I did have plans for creating a separate blog on its own domain ... but I'm wondering for our own company blog whether what would be best? I guess my concern is that if I have it at companysite.com/blog/ with eventually thousands of entries, would it dilute our main category and product pages to the search engines, where we really want our placement to be strong?

[menton]

I created a blog much like you described, hosted on a different domain and more a general blog about my topic of interest. I have linked out to both my own sites and other sites of interest, and have found it to be a great source of links. It is hard to say exactly what effect this has had on my rankings, but my rankings have improved dramatically since I launched this blog.

Hope this helps.

[wheel]

what do you mean by 'dilute'? that the pagerank will bleed? perhaps, but that's last thing I'd be concerned about.

I'm a proponent that more content is better, not worse.

The last time I dumped a few thousand pages of content on a well established site, the traffic doubled.

[nzap]

Hi, Wheel -- that's good to know. That's what I meant.

We primarily want to sell our products on our site ... that's the main reason for the site. But we wanted to create a blog to make it more interactive for our customers. So I wanted to make sure we wouldn't divert most of our traffic away from our product listings to our blog instead. That's what I meant by dilute. Does that make sense?

It sounds like you're saying I shouldn't worry about that and the content will be good either way. That's what I think too, but wanted to get more opinions.