Blog question

Which is better to have as a link

[Argentdreamer]

www.widgets.com/blog

www.widgets.blogspot.com

We are trying to figure out which of those options is better for linking purposes and SEO in general. What are the advantages and/or disadvantages of having the blog in your domain and outside of it (getting a free blog from blogspot or anywhere else).

My site is e-commerce btw in case that matters.

Thank you in advance.

Edit: We are using the blog as means to increase traffic to our main website. I believe this piece of information is important.

[edited by: Argentdreamer at 9:20 pm (utc) on Dec. 1, 2008]

[jimbeetle]

I'm always a fan of, "If it's yours, keep it on your site."

Any links a blog on your site attracts goes to your site alone and does not have to be filtered through a third party site. There really isn't a reason to put another site in the middle. Just be sure that the blog on your site is well-incorporated to pass whatever link juice you happen to attract to other pages on the site.

[MadeWillis]

another option would be to host it as a subdomain.

blog.widgets.com

[wheel]

I'm a believer that a blog is a perfect excuse for a second domain, not on the main domain. Two reasons for that:
- diversifying. You now have the opportunity for two sites to rank. And if one site tanks, there's a chance that you'll still have traffic to the other site.
- an opportunity to develop a seperate backlink profile for the blog.

[jimbeetle]

Yeah, I might do that for say, informational or affiliate sites. My thinking above is that for an e-commerce site, where it's normally difficult to build backlinks, I'd want to strengthen that site's backlink profile itself without futzing around with another site.

Argentdreamer, if you do decide to go with a blog on a separate site I'd suggest going with a domain name you own. Instead of widgets.blogspot.com go with something along the lines of widgetsblog.com, companynameblog.com, industrynews.org, etc. This gives you much more flexibility down the line.

[Argentdreamer]

Thank you all for the useful information.

Jim, we ended up going with the following:

Main Site: www.widgets.com
Blog: <keyword1keyword2>.widgets.com (without the < >)

We didn't use blog.widgets.com. It was my business partner's idea to use keywords related to our e-commerce site instead of using the word "blog". I think it makes sense, I believe the term used in SEO is keyword density? (I'm sorry, I'm kind of a newbie at SEO)

So in the end, we followed your advice and made the blog part of the main domain. Would be interesting to know your impressions about the idea of using 2 keywords instead of the word "blog" before our domain name in the URL.

[edited by: Argentdreamer at 8:54 pm (utc) on Dec. 2, 2008]

[MadeWillis]

Actually, Google tends to treat a domain and subdomain as two seperate sites. However, I believe it is much easier and a more reliable way to pass link juice between the two as opposed to hosting the blog on a seperate domain. This can be good as you may find that you can get both your top level domain and subdomain to rank on the same search results page.

I probably would have used the word blog rather than two keywords as it is a fairly standard naming convention and easy to remember for those who will frequent the blog, but either will do and I'll be interested to see how this works for you. Please keep us updated and good luck.

[edited by: MadeWillis at 9:25 pm (utc) on Dec. 2, 2008]

[Argentdreamer]

MW, that was my thought too: blog.site.com for the same reason you exposed. However I think the idea of using keywords is not too bad. I think the main reasoning behind this is that those 2 keywords are basically my business' defining keywords. So if someone looking for my widgets types the keywords in a search engine, my blog may show up in the results too.

Edit: will keep you guys updated.

[edited by: Argentdreamer at 10:13 pm (utc) on Dec. 2, 2008]

[jimbeetle]

I'm glad you decided on an approach. There's usually more than one way to skin a cat in this business and valid reasons for each.

One thing you might want to keep in mind is that while keywords in the domain or URL are of some value, over repetition might not be optimal. So, depending on how you set your navigation and assuming there might be a keyword or two in your categories and post titles, something like this...

keyword1keyword2.example.com/keyword1/title-of-keyword1-post

...might start to look a bit spammy. Not saying that it will, but something to keep in mind as you work forward.

Let us know how it goes.