Why Your Blog Should Not Be on a Subdomain, Part 1

For virtually any brand or company involved in internet marketing efforts, a valuable area of your marketing will include a blog. This blog serves a number of purposes, from drawing and informing readers on elements related to your brand to helping with various SEO-related areas.

At SEO Werkz, we get a common question when helping our clients integrate blog content into their search engine optimization and overall marketing strategies: Should my blog be on a root website (i.e sitename.com/blog) or on a subdomain (i.e blog.sitename.com)? And while not all answers in our field are simple or straightforward, this one is: In virtually all SEO-relate circumstances, root website blog placement is preferable to using a subdomain. Why is this? This two-part blog will take a look at several important factors to consider.

Subdomains Are Different Sites

For starters, the primary detail to note here is that a subdomain functions – and is viewed by Google and other search engines – as a different site. This means that to reach your blog, users will be visiting an entirely different domain, one that will be crawled and indexed separately by Google.

When you use a root website for your blog, on the other hand, everything will be combined into one. Rather than working as separate entities, which creates several issues we’ll dig into further here, your blog and the rest of your site work together to increase your rankings and visibility. Simply put, if rankings are a top priority for you, subdomain blogs are not a good idea.

Hurting Keyword Focus

Keywords are a big part of SEO marketing, and using a blog subdomain only hurts you in this area. Rather than your keywords all going toward the same common goal, you’ll be directly competing with yourself – keywords on your subdomain that are similar to those on your main site will actually take away from each other.

Now, it’s a bit more complex than this. Exact match and partial match keywords will create value even between two sites, but not nearly as strong as simply having this connection on the same site.

Lack of Indexing

A general rule of SEO: The more quality, readable pages your site has to index, the higher you’ll generally rank on Google due to its preference for authority-boosting content sources. With a blog on a root website, you maximize your potential here – Google can crawl all new posts virtually right away, increasing your traffic immediately while the content is still fresh. You’ll also add the authority of your parent site to the blog content, a factor that will not be included if you’re using a subdomain, and will weaken the rankings.

Domain Authority

Many users spend time reading blogs and social media, meaning that if people are reading your blogs, it’s a great chance to market them and increase visibility. Once again, though, if your blogs are on a subdomain, any external linkage or sharing that takes place here won’t benefit your main site at all – only the subdomain. Your main site will gain no increase in link authority, as the links in question do not originate from it. Blogs create a huge number of inbound links for your brand, but they mean very little if you can’t capitalize on them.

For more on why blog content on subdomains should be avoided for SEO purposes, or to learn about any of our online marketing or SEO services, speak to the staff at SEO Werkz today.