Should Your Blog Be on a Separate Domain?
Hindsight is 20-20. Knowing what I know now after blogging on this domain for 5 years (to the day, actually!) if I could go back and do it over I would have incorporated this blog as part of my company website and not as its own domain. Here’s why:
Blogs on separate domains can’t piggyback on the trust of your website.
When I launched this blog the search engines treated it as a brand new website, meaning it had a trust factor of zero. After five years and a massive, ongoing link building campaign the search engines have learned to trust this domain so new posts get indexed fairly quickly. When it was a new blog I didn’t have that luxury. If you are considering launching a business blog, incorporating it into your website as mywebsite.com/blog as opposed to a separate domain means that your blog posts get to piggyback on the domain authority of your company website. They are more likely to get indexed and ranking for related keywords faster because the search engines just see it as another page of content on your trusted site, not as a page on a new site.
Blogs on separate domains need their own SEO and link building strategies.
If you are going to launch your business blog on a separate domain you have to treat it like a regular website. This means writing Meta descriptions, unique title tags, optimizing the blog posts and all the other components of successful onsite SEO. You want your blog to be as “SEO friendly” as possible so that it can rank in the SERP for your most important keywords, increasing your overall online presence. This also means that you have to build a separate link building strategy for your business blog, in addition to the link building you are doing for your company website. While cross linking between your company website and business blog is vital, your blog is going to need a solid link portfolio of its own in order to do well in the search engines.
Blogs on separate domains keep readers one step away from your website.
The overriding goal of SEO is to drive more targeted visitors to your website. In my opinion, a business blog is one of the most valuable SEO tools a website has. Each blog post can rank in the search engines, increasing your overall brand presence and creating another touch point to connect with your target audience. They also help build your authority as an industry expert and fuel your social media marketing efforts. But blogs on a separate domain keep readers an extra click away from your website. When you build your blog into your site readers can easily navigate from the blog post to any internal page of your site, especially when you keep the blog design the same as your website (just look at the Brick Marketing Blog). When your blog is on a separate domain, even if it is well branded and has lots of internal linking with your website, you are asking readers to make the extra step from blog to website. You could potentially miss out on a lot of traffic.
8 Responses to “Should Your Blog Be on a Separate Domain?”
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Well, as a blog is usually easier to set up for people, especially writers looking to build some type of foundation.
I can see the situation happening often where somebody starts a blog for fun or a hobby, it becomes something more than that, but the links, SEO and others are already done and starting over with both a new website URL and a new blog URL could be too much of a hit or hassle.
That’s good insight Nick, I’ve been thinking the same things myself lately…
Appreciate the post. Jim
Hi Nick, thanks so such timely information. I’m going to start blogging on my site soon and was actually wondering if it would be better to have a subdomain for my blog or have it all together. Now I know! Keep up the good work and have a great weekend!
Cathy
I totally agree Nick and this is exactly the advice I give my clients. Just recently we designed a new blog for our client Mykonos Grand Hotel and we set it up for them at http://www.mykonosgrand.gr/blog/ because we wanted to use the existing website’s authority and at the same time we wanted to tell Google that the there is freshness and change going on on the domain. Hotel websites can’t refresh their content so often since they pretty much have specific things going on each season. So by adding this blog we have managed to keep the domain busy and growing it’s search engine saturation more and more. This effort helped the domain’s seo placements a lot. Just check Google for keywords such as “Mykonos Hotel”, “Mykonos 5 Star Hotel”, “Mykonos Luxury Hotel” and tell me what you get. None of the above would have worked if the blog was setup on a separate domain.
Very good point! An incorporated blog is also a great way to get new fresh and consistent content to your website.
I found this write-up interesting because i experimented with the same strategy using my own website. I have blog on Blogger which is a seperate domain. However, there were reasons for doing the same:
1. Most of the blogs are maintained on-site for sharing information or viewpoints with site visitors, but how of them actually read through them??? (leave aside top sites). Second reason is that blog on-site is an easy way of adding content on regular basis which is preferred for SEO. But, there are many sites which do not maintain blog but still rank high on search engines. so, even that rationale does not necessitates integration of blog to the site.
2. Seperate domain for blog enables its independent promotion, as a seperate identity. You have more leverage of playing around with it on the online media.
3. To say that the visitors are a step away from the site if the blog is not integrated, is not correct since if it found to be useful by the readers, the same can lead visitors to the site.
Nick,
Apart from SEO, for such cases we need to consider the branding aspect. It all depends on what the organization wants to achieve out of a blog and how it intends to use. Creating a blog on a different domain it may initially have less SEO value but the organization may wants to appear as more subjective on what it blogs about. I believe that if you really seriously invest on great content, there is no reason to worry about seo, it will naturally come.
Spyros, what is blog? What shall i read on a blog? Visitors would ask and it is not sexy at all as a word, i suggest you name it Life so you have the Mykonos Grand Life, so people would get tips on how life should be on such a hotel, why should i stay there what to do an all, how to enrich my life (guests to this hotel are individuals who require the best of LIFE )
It sounds more interesting and sexier, marketing is about perception, make your visitors believe that by signing up on this blog they will get the best Mykonos can offer.
Just my 2 dollars
This is good insight. I think it depends on the client. We have a bunch of clients with a separate blog URL and we have noticed that by doing this, each blog post is getting indexed separately for keywords. Plus, we are finding because the Blog also gives Link Juice to the website we are able to bring up the native website faster. My thought is to have as much real estate as possible in the SERP results and having two URL’s accomplish this. Just my 2 cents.