Should You Separate Your Blog from Your Website?
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You have a brilliant, customer-focused company website (or you soon will). You have an insightful, passion-infused blog (or you soon will). And you have an important choice to make (or you soon will):
Should you separate your blog from your website? Or would they be happier together?
Blog Options
Let’s say your main company website is www.abcinc.com.
- Integrating your blog with your website means the blog appears either at www.abcinc.com/blog (subfolder) or at blog.abcinc.com (subdomain).
(Of these, the subfolder option is better.) - Keeping your blog separate from your website means hosting it at www.xyzblog.com.
Is it better to keep your blog separate from your company website?
The short answer is…
No… most likely. Don’t separate them. Here’s why.
Advantages of integrating your blog
Integrating your blog brings a number of significant benefits that, for most companies, provide more than enough reason to choose integration.
I. Visitor benefits
- A (well-written) blog is a great way for visitors to get to know your company because it showcases your more relateable human side.
- Many website visitors today expect to find a company blog on your website and would be disappointed if they don’t.
- An integrated blog creates a more seamless visitor experience.
II. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits
- All backlinks to blog posts will contribute directly to your website’s overall SEO strength because those backlinks are pointing to your main domain. This helps all of your company website pages rank higher in search results.
- Simply having more content pages on your site will also help the entire site rank better because Google loves content-rich authority sites.
III. Company benefits
- Having a blog on your company website helps position you as a thought leader, not just a provider of services or products.
- Visitors who find your blog post will already be on your company website, that much closer to taking whatever conversion action you are targeting (email opt-in, content download, purchase, etc.).
- It’s easier and cheaper to build and maintain a single website.
- It’s easier and cheaper to establish and promote a single brand.
Integrated Blog Example
To see a highly effective example of this type of blog, check out www.moz.com, which provides some of my favorite SEO and marketing tools.
The company blogs are featured prominently in the main site navigation. Visit the blog page and you’ll see a ton of well-written, well-organized incredibly helpful blog posts spanning all aspects of internet marketing. Many posts are from guest bloggers.
Rarely do these posts directly promote company products. Rather, they have served to firmly establish MOZ.com as a thought leader in this space. This leadership attracts readers in droves. It also attracts backlinks, which boosts the overall SEO authority of MOZ.com.
Advantages of keeping a separate blog
With all these integration advantages, why might you instead choose to keep your blog separate? Here are some justifiable reasons:
- If you want a scope that isn’t highly relevant to your company’s main offerings.
- If you want a “tone” that isn’t appropriate for your company’s main site.
- If you want to promote your blog as its own brand.
- If you want to promote yourself as a more objective industry expert.
- If you might want to someday sell the blog but keep the company website.
- If you might want to someday leave or sell the company but keep the blog.
Separated Blog Example
To see a highly effective example of this type of blog, check out www.quicksprout.com, which is written by Neil Patel, one of my favorite bloggers.
Neil founded CrazyEgg.com and KissMetrics.com, and he also runs his own consulting practice. His blog posts often reference these other businesses and help drive traffic to them.
But the primary purpose of his QuickSprout blog has been to establish himself as a renowned industry expert, which he has achieved in spades.
What about SEO?
Note the glaring lack of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reasons for keeping a separate blog. This is because if your goal is to boost your main website’s SEO authority, the best way to do so is with an integrated blog.
That didn’t used to be the case. In the old days (2+ years ago), you could build any number of separate web sites, point most of their links at your main website, and successfully inflate your main website’s SEO authority and Google search rankings.
Not any more.
For obvious reasons, Google doesn’t like artificial link building. It doesn’t well serve Google’s customers, who want to see the best, most relevant websites, not the websites that SEO “experts” manipulate into the rankings.
And so Google has clamped down in a variety of ways. Google is much better at recognizing and discounting such website linking schemes, which have different characteristics than natural linking that occurs from true 3rd party sites. Google also gives much less value for multiple links from the same site. And Google gives much less value for links from low-value sites.
In other words, getting a single link each from a handful of trusted 3rd party authority sites will be more valuable to your website’s SEO strength than getting hundreds or even thousands of links from low-value sites.
Yes, you could work to build quality backlinks to your blog website so that its links, in turn, pass more value to your main website, but you’re still using an unnecessary middle man. If the blog is part of your main website, then those backlinks that it attracts will automatically and more directly help the SEO value of your main website.
What about keyword focus? Can’t a separate blog website achieve better Google rankings and more search traffic because you can optimize everything, including the domain name, for a valuable keyword?
Yes and no. Exact-match and partial-match domain names still provide some ranking value. However, you’re neglecting to consider the very substantial additional ranking boost your blog posts will receive simply by existing on your main company website rather than on a separate lower-authority blog site.
And your ultimate goal is to have your company website found, not just the blog website, right?
Bottom line: If your company website is your main focus, any SEO-building efforts will be more effective when your blog is part of your company website.
Is there a middle ground?
Sure. If you’re still undecided, you can compromise by hosting your blog at a separate domain but including a prominent link to your blog from the main navigation of your company website.
This approach provides most of the visitor benefits described above — They can easily find your blog and get to know your company better. The tradeoff is that you lose all the potential benefits of having a truly separated blog other than the ability to easily detach it from the company website later.
Conclusion
For most companies, having your blog fully integrated into your main website is the best option — for your visitors, for your SEO, and for your leadership positioning. But there are some special cases where having a separate blog is the right choice.
Use this analysis to choose the approach that best meets your goals.
Agree or disagree? Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments below.
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Thank you, this is very helpful. I think my next step will be to do some determining about the blog brand vs. my company brand – both of which are in the “consideration” phase right now. I look forward to keeping up with you!
Hi, Monique. I appreciate your comment. Does this mean you are keeping your blog separate from your website? If you wouldn’t mind sharing your particular reasons for that, other readers might find it helpful (and I’m interested, too).
Great stuff, Andrew. You tackled the exact issue I’ve been pondering. Blogs are so unattractive. I want our company brand / image to have a much different style / look. However, we survive off of our blog (i.e., the leads it generates). So I’m going to to integrate our blog because we still need the SEO.
Glad I could help, John. Good luck with it!
I just wanted to say thank you for your insight. I am new to all of this and was very up in the air about doing a blog. Thankfully you have put things into perspective for me. I now feel confident about adding a blog to my website!
Thank you for your comment, Becky. I wish you success with your new blog!
Andrew:
Currently I have two sites up. One for the my branded blog and a second company website. Content from the branded blog is posted to the company website as it is published. Company website has a archive section of published blogs. I’m concerned about SEO for both sites and if Google will lower my SERP.
Bailey — Thanks for your message.
It sounds like you need to watch out for duplicate content issues. If Google finds two pages that are nearly identical in content, it won’t know which one to return in search results, and it will sometimes decide to return neither (Ouch!).
One way you could avoid this would be by keeping the full blog post visible only on your blog site. When you post to the company website, post only introductory snippets. If someone clicks to “read more”, they will then be taken to the full post on your blog site.
Of course, you could avoid these concerns altogether if you integrated your blog into your company website. Since you are re-posting all of your blog posts on your company website anyway, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to do this?
Hope this helps.
Andrew:
Thanks for your perspective. The reason for not posting directly to the corporate site is a philosophical one. I’m positioning myself as an expert in people-to-people marketing for the aviation industry through my blog. In order to do this I give away a lot of strategic and tactical advice. My experience with most blogs housed on a corporate site is that the reader can smell the sales pitch and therefore views the content with a wary eye.
Currently the blog post acts as you describe in your second paragraph. The rub is that in order to achieve this the corporate site archives the entire article. Google search returns various SERP’s referencing either the blog site or the archived article.
Thus the quandary.
Hi Bailey,
Depending on your corporate site architecture, you might be able to tell Google to ignore the archived articles in your robots.txt file.
Barring that, I’m not sure what to suggest. I understand your reasons for wanting a separate blog. Visitors to a business site do often initially assume any blog will be biased. But many business sites do successfully overcome that bias by publishing generously helpful content and not selling in their posts.
I wish you luck.
We have been doing the same thing as Bailey. For a long time we were posting our blogs on various websites in order to get more back links. Obviously this is frowned upon now and we have stopped. We have thousands of links to our site from duplicate content now. Would you recommend just deleting these old blogs and only keeping the blog on our site (the blog with the original content)? We lost some of our Google rankings, but are still #3-4 for a lot of our keywords. Do you think deleting all of the back links from the duplicate content will hurt us?
Hi, Mel. I appreciate your question.
For everyone’s benefit, let me distinguish between guest posting and duplicate content posting. Posting a *unique* blog entry or article on a 3rd party site with links back to your site is a great way to earn honest back links and gain new traffic.
It’s posting *duplicate* content that Google frowns upon, not just because Google may not know which version to return in search results, but because it doesn’t benefit anyone to have duplicate content filling up the web.
However, if that’s already the situation you’re in, then the main question is what you asked — should you delete those duplicate posts? If you’re still ranking well for many keywords, then Google has not penalized your site for abuse. So those links themselves don’t hurt you, and some may still be helping your site’s SEO to some extent (just not as much as they used to).
So I would answer the question by looking at search results. Google the key long-tail phrases from your duplicated posts. If none of your posts are anywhere to be found in the search results, then it’s likely that the duplicated content is a problem. Try deleting duplicates and see what happens. Start with a few blog posts and, if you see good results, do the rest.
Also consider keeping some content on respected 3rd party sites and instead deleting the duplicate content from yours. You do want to keep some quality external links in the mix.
Hope this helps!
Best Regards,
Andrew
Hi,
I am very confused, hopefully you can help.
I have a blog naturalbornfoodie.com, it is about natural health and nutrition. But I want to change the domain name because it doesn’t sound like an ‘expert’. I will be a qualified nutritionist in a year and have a nutrition consulting business and want to specialist in detoxification. I want to talk about detox on my blog. I like the idea of having thedetoxguru.com as my brand name for my blog, but im not sure if I want my company website to be called this as i’m not sure if it sounds professional enough? So i can’t decide whether to have a separate blog to my main consulting website. I hope get client consultations through my blog also, so it would be nice to have it all in one.
Any advice?
Hi Sara – great question. It sounds like you want your blog to present you as an “independent authority” separate from your business. For small businesses, especially solo practitioners, I’m growing to like that approach less and less. The reason is that most of us simply don’t have the time, attention and resources to adequately build, maintain and promote two websites, especially if both are for lead generation.
And the promotion piece is big. Ideally your blog would bring traffic to your business site & vice-versa via substantial inter-linking, which also builds & shares SEO authority. But you can’t achieve that if you’re trying to treat them as truly independent.
If you want the benefits from independence, you’ll need to carefully plan out the distinct content, tone & feel for each site and maintain it rigorously. And you’ll need to plan to build and promote both sites adequately. That’s all doable, but much more challenging.
If you’re prefer a simpler, time-saving approach, which will also maximize SEO authority and traffic to your single domain, then you should combine them.
BTW, there’s no reason you couldn’t give your blog its own name even if it shares your business domain.
I wish you the best of luck!
Andrew
Hi Andrew. I know this was an old post but it is a current question for me. I have a business website and a blog (therapistmomma.com) that I am trying to get off the ground. Both have their own domains, but are hosted by Bluehost and on WordPress platforms. I’ve been trying to figure out how to integrate them so that they both keep their independant feel, and can be searched independantly, but that my blog also shows up on my website. Any thoughts and a how to point in the right direction would be much appreciated.
Hi Cheryll — To keep your website and blog independent (both in feel and in practical terms) while simultaneously “integrating” them is going to be a challenge. My best suggestion is to consider what I did with my own website and blog. If you go to my website home page (www.prometheusppc.com) you’ll find a link to my blog under the “Resources” menu item, and you’ll find 4 blog posts that I wrote intros for and posted on the home page (half way down). Similarly, on my blog site there are quite a few links back to my website, including in the main menu.
All this is more due to historical reasons than any desire to keep them separate (someday I’ll fully integrate them – it’s just low on the priority list), but it might achieve what you’re looking for. Best of luck to you.
Hi. I am new to all of this and I am trying to figure out which comes first? I have a business and a blog that I am starting they have different names, but are related. Do I start the business website and then add a blog (under it’s own blogsite name – like a sub-domain) or how do I do this? Sara, what did you end up doing and how did it work out?
Hi Nicole – At a bare minimum I’d create a business home page at {yourdomain} and the blog main page at {yourdomain}/blog. You can add further pages to your main site when you’re able.
Ahhhhhh that’s answered my question I think Andrew…I want my blog to be a lot more informal with a fun name….so I can just have a different name for it….have I got that right??? For example my website Marcie K Designs ( bespoke one off Firniture) and the blog Marcie Makes Shit Blog ( obviously aimed at a informal DIY audience !) .
It’s all very interesting
Hi Marcie — Yes, you can certainly call your blog whatever you’d like. It could relate to your business name or not. There are no limits other than your own creativity! Best of luck.
Great article that answered a lot of questions for me – thank you. This is a bit of a tangent, but hopefully not much – I have a Facebook page for my company and publish original content there. I am now thinking of moving everything to a blog. Will it affect my Google ranking if duplicate content appears on FB and my blog (I’m not sure how the search engines handle FB posts)? And, a follow-up – is there any real advantage from an SEO perspective to having a vibrant FB page…or should I focus on the blog?
Hi JD — thanks for the question.
Blog posts are generally 300-1,000 words (or more). Facebook posts are generally much shorter. Are you really talking about complete content duplication?
The best way to handle this would be to post a teaser on your Facebook page that links to your full blog post on your site. Then you get the social media exposure plus the benefits of a company blog.
Either way, a dedicated blog post on your company website would almost certainly rank higher in search engines than a duplicate post on a Facebook page.
As far as your website’s SEO is concerned, having a “vibrant FB page” won’t directly help. What really matters is whether people share your website pages (and blog posts) via their own social media sites. If your “vibrant FB page” successfully encourages that sort of sharing, then great. (Note: They’d need to share/like/tweet/+1 your blog post itself, not the FB post that points to your blog post.)
Here’s an easy way to think about it. If a 3rd party links to your content, you win. If a 3rd party shares your content, you win. Those are signals to search engines that you’ve produced something of value. Having an active FB pages does not, by itself, say anything about the value of your company website’s content.
I hope this is helpful. Best of luck to you!
Andrew
Many thanks for taking the time and effort to respond. Yes, my FB posts are of the length of a normal blog post. Going forward, I am going to do exactly as you suggest – post to my website blog, and tease it on FB. My question at this point is, if I re-post the FB posts I’ve made over the past year on my website blog, will it affect my ranking because it’s duplicate content…another way of asking is, does Google and the other search engines count FB content the same as if it was duplicate content on another site/blog? Thank you so much for your advice and input!
Hi JD,
I’m not sure how search engines would handle this precise situation in terms of deciding which content to return in search results. But I highly doubt that doing this would *hurt* your website’s rankings.
Think of it this way. The “duplicate content penalty” is rarely a *penalty*. If you happen to have the same content at two different URLs then, worst case, the search engines aren’t sure which one is better to return in search results and may not return the one you prefer. But there’s no Google intern waiting around to hit a big red “Torpedo Website Rankings” button for a case like this. 🙂
It would be a different case if you’re intentionally creating duplicated or near-duplicated content on 100 different sites all over the web in the hopes of getting cheap links and traffic. Clear abuse like this can eventually get a site truly penalized by Google.
I can’t, of course, guarantee how Google would look at your particular case, but I’d be quite surprised if they banned your site simply because of duplicated postings on your own Facebook site.
One final suggestion. When you re-post your content to your blog spread them out over time. It’s far better to post regularly (1x/week, 1x/month) than to have 10 posts in October and nothing else until 2014. And, if possible, update and improve the posts as you release them. That’s not only great for your customers, but can also help reduce duplicate content concerns.
Hope this helps.
Andrew
“If you link to the same internal page multiple times in a single blog post, make sure you optimize the first occurrence of that link. Typically, search engines will rely more heavily on the first instance of anchor text for a given link than subsequent instances. “
Hi, Ralph. That’s true. Thanks for sharing the tip.
Hi Andrew,
thanks for sharing your opinion about when to seperate and when to integrate your blog and website.
I can see the advantages and disadvantages of integrating a blos into the website. I would love to hear your opinion about the following:
Would it be benefical to integrate a blog into a clinical website? Since the pharma and medicine companies rely on trust and reputation, wouldnt it be a great chance to keep them seperated and strengthen the overall reputation and competences within a seperated more objective blog? Would you agree on that?
Thanks again for the insightful post!
Joerg
Hi Joerg,
Thank you for your question.
“Separate” does not necessarily mean “more objective”.
You can write a very balanced blog directly on your business website and win appreciation from your readers for your candor and objectivity.
Similarly, you’d have to earn a reputation for objectivity on any 3rd party blog site you create, which can be easily squandered if you’re perceived as favoring one particular business.
So I’d tend to focus on reasons other than “perceived objectivity” for choosing a separate or integrated blog. While that might be a small plus for a separate blog, it’s hard to outweigh the benefits of an integrated blog for your own business.
On the other hand, if you think you’d really be able to establish yourself as a prominent industry authority, wholly separate from your clinic, then I wouldn’t want to discourage you from setting up a separate blog to better enable that goal.
Hope this is helpful,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
I really like your article. It is clear, thoughtful and, in my opinion, right-on. The only thing I would add is that sometimes companies need to separate the blog from the website due to technical constraints.
For example, my e-commerce company has been running on a DNN site that was built in 2006 (yes, I know, we’ve grown organically so… the site is what it is) until, like, today, when we switch to a new Drupal platform.
All I ever wanted was /blog however the old site, for a variety of reasons, simply didn’t permit that. So our SEO-friendly workaround was to build a WordPress site with the blog. prefix.
Now that we’re moving to the Drupal platform we can finally bring the blog under the URL as /blog.
Great article! Do you have much experience with multilingual ecommerce sites / SEO?
Erica
Hi Erica — Thank you for your comments.
Yes, there are often historical reasons for the way things are. Glad you hear you guys are moving on to Drupal. I’m sure you’ll love it much better all around, for the blog and more.
As far as multilingual sites — Yes, I’m building one right now, actually. It’s an SEO-optimized Japanese / English site for a client in Tokyo.
If you’d like to talk more, feel free to send me a message/email at the Contact link above.
Best Regards,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thank your helpful and interesting article.
I was hesitating so far, but i think i’ll go for an integrated blog.
The only problem is the blog design, it’ll be a little hard to customize the templates so they will look the same as main website design!
Do you have any suggestions regarding which blog is better: wordpress, blogger, overblog, … ?
Regards,
Reda
Hi Reda,
You can style a different template to look the same as the main website, though it could take a good deal of work. But there are so many sites where the blog doesn’t match the main site styling, that I don’t think most people care, or even notice. Did you notice or care that my blog looks different from my main site?
I’ve only used WordPress and Joomla for blogs, so I can’t comment on the other ones you mentioned. I can tell you that I’ve seen no reason to ever leave WordPress.
I wish you luck!
Andrew
I agree with each and every conclusion made on this topic. It is really very informative. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Andrew,
Here’s an exact quote from our web developer when I asked your exact topic: “I would recommend getting a blog on a separate hosting account. Why? Because if you host it on the same server and your blog gets hacked, which is happening more and more these days, you will not risk affecting your main website that brings in your new students. So, you can set up a simple WordPress or Blogger blog yourself and simply link to it”
We’ve never experienced hacking and we use PayPal for customer purchases. Should I be worried about hacking to the point of using a blogging host?
Hi, Sam. Great question. First off, it sounds like you are wisely NOT storing customer credit card info on your server, instead using PayPal. So unless you’re storing other highly sensitive customer data, damage from potential hacking should be limited.
Second, any website can be hacked, and blogs are as secure as you want them to be. WordPress comes with many security plugins you can optionally use. To be extra safe you can have an expert edit your .htaccess file and configure your server for additional security.
Sure, hacking is always a risk, but you have to decide if incrementally higher security is worth the cost of less effective SEO and a less coherent user experience.
I hope this is helpful.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the article – interesting perspective on where to host. I’ve tried the blog subdomain and /blog approach and have to say that, at first blush, moving to the sub-domain approach from /blog resulted in a drop in organic traffic but with the (not set) chaos thanks to Google it’s a little trickier to pinpoint these days!
Adam
Hi Adam — Thanks for your comment.
Any move like that (in either direction) is likely to result in a short-term drop in organic traffic while the search engines fully update their indices. And of course it’s essential to do 301 redirects so the links don’t get lost.
But the million dollar question is — does the traffic come back stronger after the dust settles? I’d advocate the /blog approach in general, but there may still be some special cases where using the subdomain could provide a better long-term result. It does need to be considered on a case by case basis.
Yes, isn’t Google’s massive increase in “(not set)” and “(not provided)” data ever so helpful?
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
We are wanting to start a blog using WordPress on our existing domain and were wondering about the WordPress options – WordPress.com and WordPress.org. From what I read, WordPress.org is the way to go if we want to drive traffic to our site for SEO value so that we can use our existing domain but our IT department is worried about constantly having to update with this option. Do you know of another solution which helps retain SEO value, allows for a new blog to be added to an existing site and limits the upgrades needed by IT?
Hi Kelli,
Thank you for your question. Any business that wants a serious web presence needs their own domain. So, yes, you would not want to use WordPress.com (for that reason among others).
The free open-source download from WordPress.org gives you full control and full flexibility over your site. It is the simplest CMS (Content Management System) in the world to set up and maintain. If you have an IT department, updating the software of a a WP website is something they should be able to do during one coffee break a month (or quarter).
I would need to understand your business to make more specific recommendations. Feel free to click the Contact button at the top-right of the page and send me a message.
Good luck!
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the article.
I have a website set up offering services and online program, however I am currently working out legalities with lawyers to make sure I not breaking any laws in my profession and currently doing some further product testing before driving people to this website.
In the meantime I want to be driving traffic to blog posts and building a subscriber list as soon as possible, so I am not wasting any time, however I dont want people to be seeing my services/products just yet.
I feel my options for driving traffic to blogs and building a subscriber list now are:
A)I build a new blog website on a new domain and drive people here and then when the above are sorted redirect this page to my initial site.. Or,
B) If possible, hide current pages on my initial site/domain and just leave the blog page and a few others unhidden for viewing and when the above is sorted open up all of the pages.
What would you recommend?
Hope that made sense.
Thanks
Michael
Hi Michael — I appreciate your question.
Either approach would work fine for what you want to accomplish. I would go with (B) just because dealing with a single site is easier to manage, and you’ll be able to bring everything live more quickly once you’re ready.
Good luck with it!
Andrew
Awesome..
I went with Option B, getting everything sorted now.
Thanks for your help Andrew
Glad I could help, Michael. Good luck!
Great article! I’m desperate to integrate our blog and website on the same server… but unfortunately just found out our Windows server won’t host our WordPress blog. After reading your points, I’m even more convinced it needs to happen! Are you aware of any blogs that can be hosted on a Windows server or do you recommend us biting the bullet and switching to a PHP server? Thanks
Hi Melinda — Thanks for your question.
I’m afraid I have no experience with Windows servers. The web developers I’ve worked with over the years wouldn’t touch them. Linux (PHP) servers are the worldwide standard for flexibility and reliability. I’m sure there are blogs that will run on Windows servers, but I unfortunately don’t know what they would be.
I wish you luck in getting your blog up and running!
Andrew
Hi Melinda
It might depend specifically on your windows server – because this looks like WordpPress might run on windows:
http://www.microsoft.com/web/wordpress.
That being said I know Joomla! can be run up on a windows server (I use Joomla for my blog).
Thanks for the helpful post, Audra!
Thanks for the very informative article. My question is this: I am a chiropractor and my clinic domain will contain the word chiropractic and the city I am located in so that I can optimize SEO that way. My thought process for wanting to separate my blog is that I want my blog to be widely visible and relevant not just to the city. I want to establish myself as an expert in nutrition and wellness, and so will not be blogging just about chiropractic. Will it hurt my SEO if I just have the first 50 words of my blog posts on my website but then link out to my separate blog?
Hi Stephanie — Thanks for your question.
It’s hard to know Google’s exact word count threshold for “duplicate content confusion”. But posting a snippet that links to a full post is a very common practice so shouldn’t be a problem.
However, keep in mind that most of the SEO value you’ll be creating from this blog content will be helping your blog site (where the full posts exist) rather than your clinic site.
Best of luck to you!
Andrew
This is a great article. We have been doing this with our client sites and it has worked great for SEO purposes. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Andrew
Many thanks for your interesting and informative article. I am a newbie who is about to start a blog and then in the future an e-commerce business. My thinking was to grow the blog first and then to somehow incorporate it into the e-commerce site when it is up and running. My hope and intention was that the blog would help to improve the seo of the e-commerce business and that any blog followers might then be attracted to browse the e-commerce site from the blog. If I use a simple blogging platform like Google’s Blogger would it be possible to incorporate it onto an e-commerce site later that had been created using something like ‘Shopify’ ? Would the blog then benefit the seo of the e-commerce site or does the blog have to be an integral feature of the e-commerce platform in order for it to provide seo benefits in this way ?
Hi Amanda,
There are two main pieces you’ll need to think about.
1) Domain
If you’re building the SEO authority of a blog located at MyCoolBlog.com, then that is the primary domain that will benefit. So if you want to plan for eventual integration as you describe, with your ecommerce site leveraging the SEO benefits, you may want to begin with having the blog located at MyEcommerceSite.com/blog. You can set this up even if the Ecommerce site and the blog are built on entirely different platforms.
2) Internal linking
The other way to have your blog benefit the SEO of your ecommerce site is to link from your blog posts to your ecommerce site pages. You can do that regardless of the domains where they exist.
I hope that helps?
Andrew
Many thanks for your help!
Andrew, very interesting post – thx!
What do you think about this?
We have a very specialized consulting business and positioned ourselves as experts – with a blog.
We have as well a quite low profile website on a separate domain which we are updating in near future. I’d like to integrate the blog in the website, but the blog has much more traffic than the website.
I think we could still link on the blog sites (under its “old name” as an headline, as landing pages) to gather all the blog interested people. But what about the old valuable links on the blog posts? Will we loose them and does this hurt our ranking?
What would be your approach?
Hi Sabine — Thanks for your question.
You certainly don’t want to lose all those valuable links from 3rd party sites pointing to your various blog posts. Those are important “votes of authority” in Google’s eyes for SEO purposes.
What you need to do, when you’re ready to migrate the blog to your new site, is set up “301 redirects” so that anyone clicking on an old URL will be brought to the same blog post at its new URL. Google sees those as “permanent URL moves” and continues to give you full credit for the old links.
Setting up 301 redirects can be a bit tricky and the process varies by platform. I’d suggest working with a knowledgeable developer to implement it for you.
Hope this helps.
Andrew
Thx a lot for your advice!
Just wanted to say that this article and the detailed answers to people’s questions were incredibly helpful to me! We are planning to import a client’s external blog articles into their main site, but I had concerns about what would happen to their SEO and the old links. Your suggestion for a 301 redirect is exactly the solution I was looking for. Thanks so much!
Glad to help, Candy. Best of luck!
Very good answers to everyone’s questions… so thanks for doing this.
We have a website http://www.buildingperformanceservices.com that works perfectly. When customers go on it, we almost always get the work… so that part is cool. It was built in iWeb and I am getting ready to convert it to Easyweb and want to start a blog. It is clear from your previous answers that having the blog be part of the web site is the way to go.
Here is my problem… we are insulation contractor and the the word “insulation” is nowhere to be found. I recently bought insulationgeek.com thinking it would be a great name for a blog about insulation. My real question is… is there a way to use insulation geek.com to link to my buildingperformanceservices.com/blog page?
I love all the creative questions. Keep them coming, guys! 🙂
If you will have your main site and your blog both at the buildingperformanceservices.com domain, then there is no value in pointing a brand new domain with no SEO authority at your blog. You would need to put in effort to build SEO authority for the new domain, and that effort is usually much better spent on your main domain.
What you could do is call your blog “The Insulation Geek”, or something similar, and make the URL be: buildingperformanceservices.com/insulation-geek-blog. This then gets the keyword “insulation” into your page title, page header (h1 tag) and in the URL, each of which will contribute some small SEO boost.
Hope that helps!
Andrew
We have a blog that has been around since around 2010 on Blogger. We just recently converted our site to WordPress. Is there a way to merge blogger post into our new site? Do we leave blogger up and start a blog on the WordPress site? Will Blogger not being updated hurt us? I really want to utilize the authorship features of Google because we are experts in our field and what to share that knowledge.
Thanks for the great information. I agree that the blog being on the site is important. We also have a press page, should that page also be the blog? I know a lot of questions.
Hi, Meghan. I’m not very familiar with Blogger, I’m afraid. There may be tools that will import Blogger posts into WordPress. I’d try Googling.
I wouldn’t maintain two different company blogs unless they are on very different topics. So I’d find some way to move the old posts over to WordPress.
You can easily apply Google Authorship markup to a WordPress blog, so that’s not a concern.
I would keep press on a regular WordPress page. A valuable blog is all about the customer. Press is all about the company. I wouldn’t muddy them together.
Hope this is helpful.
Andrew
HI Andrew,
I’m setting up a new fashion website and I had been told I should have the blog on an external platform for SEO purposes which it sounds like from your article is not the case. Is there a benefit in having both – so an internal website blog to build up SEO and strength of our website and a different blog on Tumblr for example with different content, perhaps more visual, that is more like an extra social media site and might help drive traffic to our main website? Thanks! Naomi
Hi, Naomi. Having an *additional* blog (or any other content source) separate from your website that can capture additional traffic and bring new visitors to your main website could of course be a very good thing.
My main concern would be whether you have the bandwidth. If you need to spend time, energy and money on this additional blog, will your main website and blog suffer as a result? If so, it may not be a good tradeoff overall for your business.
But if Tumblr is where you believe your best customers can be found, then it might be worth splitting your attention.
I’m sorry that I don’t have a clear cut answer. It really depends on where you believe you can best reach new customers and on your available resources.
Andrew
Thanks for the info! I am currently a FT graphic designer – wannabe freelance designer SAHM with my three little ones. I would like to ideally incorporate my design business with a humorous really life blog/design inspiration & projects. That’s my life, so why not share. My issue – I have 2 domain names that I LOVE. One plain ole one for my design business, and one for the mommy blog. Do I make 2 different websites or combine? And how can I use both domains if I do combine? Can the blog link go to a different URL? Thanks!
Hi, Lisa. Great questions. First, keep in mind that creating, refining and maintaining two websites can be twice as much work (or more). A lot of things are simpler with a single site.
Plus, the personality and humor that it sounds like would come through your blog could be a great way to make your business site more unique and more approachable at the same time.
If you do a single site, there’s no great way to use both domain names. You’ll have to choose. Yes, you can redirect one to the other, but that’s really of little value.
If you decide to keep the sites separate, yes — you can certain place a “blog” link on your business site that goes to your second domain.
Hope this helps!
Andrew
Andrew, thanks for the tips. I’m a new fan! The small business I work for wants a blog for various reasons (including SEO and to grow the site content). The boss wants the blog posts to double as website pages, but the writing style and content are not a direct fit. My ideal would be to create independent pages for the website, then write blog entries (still on the same domain) with links back to the web pages (allowing more flexible blog content). From an SEO perspective, are there advantages to this?
Wendy — Tell your boss you have the right plan. 🙂
People have different expectations for blog posts vs. static site pages. If you try to blur the line, it will just lead to unnecessary confusion.
From an SEO perspective it doesn’t matter too much (content is content, links are links) except that properly configured blogs will auto-notify web services (including search engines) each time you post, which helps visibility. Plus most blog-writing platforms (like WordPress) help optimize the content for SEO.
But from a visitor perspective, this content distinction is important. Keep all your blogs posts organized under a clear “Blog” menu item. Your static site pages, on the other hand, should be architected and organized to best meet your online business objectives (product sales, lead generation, etc.).
Thanks Andrew – your prompt reply and advice is much appreciated.
I would just like to share my reason for separating my blog from my website because I pondered about this forever. I chose the middle ground of adding a link on my page after reading this post. I have an author page, but it is solely for my children’s book series about fruits & vegetables and my food illustrations. I have a blog connected to it, but I list it as “Resources” on my nav bar because I only post information and resources pertaining to children’s health & nutrition and any educational materials related to my book.
My personal blog is listed as “blog” on my nav bar. Although, it is related to my art and life, it has a different tone of writing I probably could have combined it, but my desired layout wouldn’t have been possible. I would also like to monetize it and add a shop in the future, and the idea of advertising with affiliated links on my author page bothers me.
It is a lot of work, but I’m finally getting the hang of it.
Thank you for your insight!
Very nice! I’m glad to hear this approach is working for you.
I am considering adding a blog of articles for photographer resources, but I already have a blog to showcase my photography sessions.
Would it be beneficial to have a separate blog for my photographer following? My whole
Point of writing any articles would be solely for SEO purposes and to be seen as a thought leader as you stated.
Also, I am wordpress.com. Is that a bad choice as a business? I have my own domain name.
Should I have gone with WordPress.org and if I wanted to switch would that be SEO suicide?
I just want the best shot at SEO and traffic and growth.
Hi Jasmin – Great questions.
If the second blog is targeting a different market (professional photographers vs. consumers), then a separate blog is the best idea. If you combine all content in a single blog, each audience could find the postings irrelevant half the time. Not good.
However, if your goal is to accrue SEO benefits, then you’d need the second blog to exist on your main website, too. There are ways to do this with WordPress (WordPress.org full installation), but I’m not sure if you can do that with a WordPress.com account. You’d have to check with them.
WordPress.com isn’t necessarily a bad choice. It makes running the site easier for anyone not familiar with setting up websites. But it does limit your flexibility (access to far fewer plugins).
If you wanted to switch from WordPress.com to your own fully-hosted WordPress installation, it can be done without the search engines ever knowing. You just need to maintain the same URLs for all the pages.
Good luck with whatever you decide, and keep in mind that the most important element for building authority isn’t SEO-this or fancy-that. It’s the ability to produce insightful, truly valuable content for your market.
Thank you! I have transferred over to wordpress.org and am now making it my goal to integrate two separate blogs onto my single website.
Any advice nowhere to start?
Thank you!
Hi Jasmin,
I haven’t set up multiple blogs on a single WordPress site myself, but I believe the best way to do it is using a WordPress multisite installation.
Here are some links to get you started:
http://mashable.com/2012/07/26/beginner-guide-wordpress-multisite/
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-install-and-setup-wordpress-multisite-network/
Good luck!
Andrew
Great post! Quick question that I haven’t seen addressed yet…
Let’s say a company, mikespizza.com, publishes their blog URL as mikespizza.com/blog. However, when a user goes to that link it 301 redirects to mikespizza.tumblr.com. From an SEO perspective, is the value the same as if the blog were actually hosted at /blog?
Hi Michael – Thanks for your question.
If you’re asking if mikespizza.com/blog will get SEO value in this case, the answer is “no”. A 301 redirect from URL A to URL B tells search engines to completely ignore URL A and give all SEO credit to URL B. It’s as if URL A doesn’t exist.
So, for any inbound links pointing at mikespizza.com/blog, mikespizza.com will get no SEO value while mikespizza.tumblr.com gets all the SEO value.
Hope that helps.
Hi – Great post, has for sure helped my understanding of sharing content either via integrated blog (within own website), or by external blog (blog platform), just a quick question to help with my situation on this subject…
If you have a online store/e-commerce website selling products, but don’t currently have a blog (to promote news feed on products, industry news, related public news, etc, which then from these posts link to products on my
website, etc), can using an external blog from blogger or else only, help seo value as effectively as an integrated blog within your website (so just having one blog from blogger or else, so we can avoid duplicate content,
middleman)…? Please note the website homepage and other pages will have image/text links to the blog on blogger, and vice versa from the blog on blogger as explained above.
Additionaly reason for the question above – is that my online store/ecommerce website is designed/hosted/developed by web design company (so they have access to the code, etc), and for me to have a integrated blog on the
website – then I have to go through them to have this integrated blog, which I don’t really want to, as I want better control for my blog, so I can make changes/updates whenever, and not to always get charged over-the-top
for these changes/updates – because if I could start again with my online store/ecommerce website years ago, then I would have via Shopify/Big Commerce platforms – where I have more control.
Also to the question above – can using your own domain name in blogger not help with the seo value like the way an integrated blog can…?
Many Thanks
Shiv
Hi Shiv — Let me say a few things. First, if your web design company won’t make it easy for you to publish new blog posts yourself, then you should find a new web design company. There’s no excuse for that in 2014.
Second, having a blog link to your website only helps your SEO to the extent that your blog has significant SEO authority. And, generally, if you’re working to give your blog significant SEO authority, why not just have the blog on your website so that your whole website benefits directly?
Third, “using your own domain name in blogger” means.blogger.com, right? No, that will not help your website at .com.
If you want maximum SEO benefit for your own domain, then get all your content on your own domain.
Thank you for this article! What if I already have a lifestyle blog under my name and I am choosing not to sell my products on Etsy anymore, but my business products go by a different name? Should I sell my products on Shopify to not create another word press website. Or should I just add my business name to my blog menu opening up woo commerce and not have a paid domain name for it?
Hi Melissa – That’s a complicated question, and I’m afraid I didn’t quite follow it. If you’d like to ask again in a different way, or perhaps spelling out in more detail the cases you’re mentioning, I’ll be happy to try again!
Hi – Great post, has for sure helped my understanding of sharing content either via integrated blog (within own website), or by external blog (blog platform), just a quick question to help with my situation on this subject…
If you have a online store/e-commerce website selling products, but don’t currently have a blog (to promote news feed on products, industry news, related public news, etc, which then from these posts link to products on my website, etc), can using an external blog from blogger or else only, help seo value as effectively as an integrated blog within your website (so just having one blog from blogger or else, so we can avoid duplicate content, middleman, etc)…? Please note the website homepage and other pages will have image/text links to the blog on blogger, and vice versa from the blog on blogger as explained above.
Additionaly reason for the question above – is that my online store/ecommerce website is designed/hosted/developed by web design company (so they have access to the code, etc), and for me to have a integrated blog on the website – then I have to go through them to have this integrated blog, which I don’t really want to, as I want better control for my blog, so I can make changes/updates whenever, and not to always get charged over-the-top for these changes/updates – because if I could start again with my online store/ecommerce website years ago, then I would have via Shopify/Big Commerce platforms – where I have more control.
Also to the question above – can using your own domain name in blogger not help with the seo value like the way an integrated blog can…?
Many Thanks
Shiv
Hi Andrew!
Impressive engagement you’ve got here! I’m scratching my head over whether to put my two blogs/business areas on the same site or separate them, both from a visitor trust perspective and from an SEO perspective. I have recently started my consultancy firm and I offer services within sustainability and sustainability communications on one hand and cheap marketing for small businesses on the other. These areas do overlap some but I am afraid that they may seem so far apart that it looks suspicious to my customers. At the same time, there are keywords like “brand”, “strategy” and “communication” that are shared and if I put the two blogs on separate sites/domains I divide the page authority and page rank. What would you do?
Hi Fredrik – Great questions.
From your brief description, those sound like different business enterprises to me. Unless the way you provide “cheap marketing” is through “sustainability”?
Answer this by trying to think like a customer. If they want to learn more about cheap marketing, would they view sustainability as an off-topic distraction? And vice-versa? If so, I’d make separate sites.
If appropriate, you could also consider a single site with separate areas for these two topics, but only if you have a clear way to combine this full scope under a meaningful common theme that doesn’t confuse prospects more than it helps.
I wouldn’t give any thought to keywords like “brand”, “strategy” and “communication”. Unless you manage to build a very large, successful company with a huge internet presence, your site pages will never rank highly for such broad terms. You need to identify multiple-word keywords that are highly relevant to each of your focus areas, and have less competition, and target those with your SEO.
Hope this is helpful!
Andrew
Andrew, thank you for the idea of using only *summaries* of blog posts on the home page, in order to avoid the duplicate content penalty. I’ve voiced this concern on several forums, and you’re the only one who gave a useful answer (use snippets, not full content).
My next question is, how do I publish WordPress content *outside* of WordPress? I.e. the blog is installed in http://www.mysite.com/blog/, how do I show content on the homepage of http://www.mysite.com?
Hi TJ — Are you saying that /blog is a WordPress site but your main site is a different platform? If so, unless you can find a ready-made plugin that interfaces the two platforms (or want to pay someone to build one for you), you’d have to post the content snippets manually on your non-WordPress home page.
Thank you so much Andrew. I’ve been looking for the exact question and right answer which you provided me.
Glad I could help, Jaydeep!
Hi Andrew,
Thank you so much for such a helpful post and what an impressive engagement you have achieved indeed.
I would highly appreciate your insight on a situation I’ve found myself trying to decipher. See, I manage a Hotel, own a tour company and am considering launching a portal blog to position myself as an expert in Travel-related information pertaining to my country (Belize). I am currently upgrading my hotel’s website and want to integrate a blog to it. I have just launched my Tour Company’s website and wish to have a blog for it as well. My Belize Portal blog will be a separate blog. This leaves me with three blogs in total. I am battling the decision of having both my hotel and tour company site link to my Belize portal blog site but am worried about the lack of SEO for my websites. If I create 3 separate blogs, I’m worried about content creation or duplication. What would be your advise in this case?
Your advise would be highly appreciated, thank you!
Francisco — What a great question. Let me answer it in pieces.
1) You need 3 different people to own these 3 different blogs. With your responsibilities you are far too busy in other, more critical, areas to try to manage all 3 yourself. And it does sound like they should be separate blogs. So, choose which blog YOU can be most effective in owning and writing for (probably your authority Belize travel blog), and then delegate the other two.
2) Don’t simply link the sites to each other. There is a more effective approach, both for SEO and for visitor trust. That approach is to contextually link the sites where it makes sense to do so. For example, if your travel blog features a post about hotels in Belize, then link to your hotel website. That is a natural, welcome and more effective approach. Definitely do not create duplicate content — instead create supplemental content that relates well to each other.
I hope this helps, and I wish you the best of luck.
Andrew
Biggest challenge for me is to get the visitors from my blog posts to go to the main site pages on same domain.
Most raed the posts and are off!
Any good tips for me?
Two thing you can do.
1: Make your posts relevant to your main site, and embed contextual links to your main site within your posts.
2: Give blog visitors a compelling reason to give you their email address so that you can continue to market to them over time and bring them back to your main site.
Advantages of keeping a separate blog seem very less than the advantages of integrating the blog with company website. From SEO point of view, It is always recommended to have a blog page on the website which helps in boosting the traffic of the website a lot.. Hats off to you for listing out these advantage points!
Hi! Fantastic article… and still getting comments/questions more than a year later — that’s what I am hoping my new blog/site will do.
I am launching a new business / website / blog at the same time — product and content development services. It’s all brand new, so no link authority to deal with for either. I plan my blog to be about the same topics I offer services for and will be integrating with my site. My question is two parts:
1–Should just call the blog “ProductSLAM blog” to be consistent with a new brand or use something more fun but still playing on that theme… like “the SLAMarize blog” or “SLAMmable.”
2–Regardless of the answer to #1 should I buy a domain for the log and then 301 redirect it to my productSLAM.com/blog page. So that I have a direct URL to use when I want for the blog. (e.g., productslamblog.com, theslamblog.com, slamarize.com etc.).
SLAM is an acronym I plan to use a lot around the same, separate from the brand, so I am ok separating it. Just struggling with whether a less “branded,” more approachable blog is actually going to hurt me as I try to build the company brand.
Thanks!
Hi Paula – Great questions.
1) I’m afraid I’m no expert on naming. Using your branding term is good reinforcement. But as to how playful you want to be with the name — for that you’d need to really understand your particular target audience and the type of experience they’d want to have with your blog.
2) You could do that (301 redirect), but it’s not necessary, and it might confuse some visitors. It’s generally desirable that the URL in the link a visitor clicks matches the URL of the page they’re taken to – for trust and transparency purposes. Google AdWords, for example, wouldn’t let you use a redirect in that way because they consider it to be misleading.
Hope this helps. Best of luck to you!
Andrew
Hello Andrew,
I am a real novice and tying to digest not only your informative article but many of the comments you have received. Thanks for your time.
Background -I am a tour guide and thinking of starting my own small touring business. I have a website in progress but I think I am a year or so away from making it happen for legal reasons. So I will continue to guide for another company. However, I want to start blogging about my travel, travel tips,etc now. I have 2 questions –
1 – Not sure if I can do this but maybe I can use my current website and only have my blog on it for now, and hide all my other pages in progress. If I find out that I can do this, is the only way for people to see my blog by first going to my website? Or can google searches (say about truffles in France) lead you to the blog without you having to know about my website?
2- If I can’t use my current website in progress and start with an external blog will it be easy to get old blog copy on my site when I eventually launch? Are there some blog sites better at allowing for this?
Many Thanks
Hi Dana – Thanks for your questions.
1a) Yes, you can easily start your website as just a blog and add other pages later. Many platforms will support this. I usually recommend WordPress.
1b) Google will know that your blog is a blog, whether it’s hosted on your website or elsewhere, as long as all the tagging and RSS is set up appropriately (again WordPress does this for you).
2) You could also go this route, and it’s pretty easy with popular platforms, but there’s no need because of (1a) above.
Hope this helps!
Andrew
Thanks Andrew. Sounds easy and no reason not to start blogging right away!
Dana
Hi Andrew,
I’m creating content on the blog for Intrica Consulting, I want to use my knowledge to reach out to fellow workers in my industry (Business Analysis) as well as managers of businesses (potential customers).
However, I’m concerned that having consulting in the domain is likely to put bloggers off in linking back to my content. Should I separate the blog from the site? Any views on this is much appreciated.
Hi Matt — Thanks for your question.
The #1 motivation for any blogger to link to your content is that your content is stellar. I.e., it makes them look good to direct their readers to it. That’s it. Anything else is quite secondary. Domain names would be way down the list of concerns.
Write something helpful, insightful, and shareable, and you’ll get all the links you could want.
Hope this helps.
Andrew
Hi Andrew, firstly I would like to say that this has been a really great article to read. From my side I think its more beneficial to keep your website and blog together. Remember your website will have a certain amount of pages which means you won’t have that much content that can be indexed in Google or other search engines but if you integrate your blog to your website you’ll be able to get more pages indexed which could lead to more visitors to your website. I’m doing this and it’s working really well in-terms of getting more traffic to my website. I don’t disagree with your recommendations, I just think you should identify what you want from your website and use that as your basis. Non the less this was a great article and sorry for the lengthy comment. Hope I contributed to the discussion. Cheers
This was very interesting read. I’m just facing same problem. If I should separate my blog from the main site or not. I just hired an SEO specialist to work on my site and the first thing what he said was that I have way too many pages of my site. My main website holds only 38 pages, but /blog has more then 900 blog entries which are treated as separate pages.
So in google it shows that I have over 1000 pages. He is saying that I need to really trim down those pages, but I’m not sure why. I thought that larger your site is, then better it should be.
Should I leave this as it is or open separate domain for the blog?
Thank you Andrew.
Regards,
Armands
Hi Armands — Thank you for your question. Did your SEO specialist say WHY he recommends that you trim down your page count? More content is generally better as it gives search engines more chances to show your content for relevant searches. However, if many of those blog posts are very short, redundant or off-topic, then they won’t likely help you much. Worse, if content is duplicated on many posts, then Google may decide that the site is a bit spammy and then not show any of your pages as much. I’d ask for clarification of his recommendation. Good luck.
Bonjour Andrew,
thanks very much for this post – I had been hesitating to start a blog, short of answering that very question. I can now move forward, but would love your perspective on a detail question, linked to the moz.com site you referenced. They have four blogs in their blog section.
I happen to sell services in different categories: wine tasting, cooking classes, baking classes, corporate teambuilding, etc…
From an SEO standpoint and in general if one sells multiple categories and can consider creating separate original content for each of these categories, should then one consider multiple well separated blogs? Or just separated categories in one blog?
Any perspective would be appreciated
Merci
Cheers
Fred
Hi Fred – Great question! My answer is simple: Would the SAME target customer be intrigued and engaged by posts on all 4 topics? If so, then a single blog is ideal for them (you offer more value) and easier for you. If not, then multiple blogs are ideal for them (they only subscribe to what they really care about), and better for your business in the long run.
Remember the ultimate goal — to get visitors to subscribe to your email lists and eventually become customers. If you fill their inbox or RSS reader with posts that they don’t care about, they will unsubscribe and never return.
For example, it might be natural to combine your cooking classes and baking classes into a single blog. Perhaps wine tasting, too, if you can sensibly connect them, and if your ideal prospects really care about all three. Corporate team building, however, strikes me as a very different topic for a very different target market.
Think about engaging your target customers first, SEO second. And from an SEO perspective, I don’t see that there would necessarily be much difference between 4 small blogs on your site or 1 large blog on your site — all the content is still on your site.
I hope that helps!
Andrew
Dear Andrew,
Thank you very much for this insightful article, that deals with exactly what we’ve been struggling with.
Our problem is this: we will soon have to main websites, one for our healthy snack subscriptions and one for our retail brand (different product than the other). We want one blog site to serve both.
Also, all your reasons for wanting a separate blog site apply to us, so we are in favor of having a separate blog microsite. Its goal is to position ourselves as industry leader. The blog will have a scope much wider than just healthy snacks. It will deal will health behaviour in general.
There would be a link in the main navigation menu of both main websites linking to the blog site.
Do you agree this approach would be best?
Also, why would this be the case?: ‘The tradeoff is that you lose all the potential benefits of having a truly separated blog other than the ability to easily detach it from the company website later.’
Thank you so very much in advance for any reply!
Kind regards,
Thomas
Hi Thomas — Based on what you wrote, your approach seems reasonable. What I meant with that comment is that by linking to a separate blog in this way you don’t provide a seamless visitor experience (though this is generally minor), some blog visitors may never make it to your company sites (this is a bigger deal), and the blog will do little for the SEO value of your main sites (though you can make up for this a bit by occasionally linking from new blog posts into those sites — sensibly of course). Good luck with it.
Hey Andrew,
Great post, exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out over the weekend!
So my dilemma is that I originally started my website as a blog on tumblr, then recently I decide to invest in a website on Squarespace to make everything look more legit. Right now I have the blog as an external link that clicks through to http://www.belindalovelee.tumblr.com
But my concern is that if I integrate the tumblr posts into my website as a /blog (subdomain) I’ll essentially have two blogs with the same content and I don’t want people to get confused. Also I have strong following on my tumblr blog that I don’t want to loose. Essentially I have two websites at the moment.
Would you suggest that it’s still better to integrate the blog as a subdomain, or should I just leave it as is? Or is there another solution that you’d suggest?
Thank you again for all your time and effort!
Hi Belinda — Thank you for your question.
Tumblr is certainly a fine place for a blog, and if you have a strong following there I’d be hesitant to give it up. You certainly don’t want duplicate blogs — don’t go that route. But this is a tough call — You’d have to weigh a potential loss of prospect traffic from Tumblr vs. a potential gain of prospect traffic from search engines if you move your blog to your company site. Both sides of that equation are very hard to calculate and predict.
In your situation I might recommend keeping the blog at Tumblr. Remember that with tight integration (main menu navigation, cross links back and forth), you can still have many of the benefits of a fully integrated blog. And you keep your Tumblr following. And it’s less work for you.
I hope this helps!
Andrew
I’m glad to see your comments seem to point that this way of thinking is still the same since you wrote this article a year an a half ago. In the ever changing world of technology, would you still recommend this philosophy. Do you see a difference between business types, i.e. a college website/blog vs. a business selling a direct product (fully understanding that a college is still “selling” something). Would love to hear your opinion! Thanks for your great articles.
My philosophy on this topic is still the same – Nothing has changed significantly in this space in the past year. And while I don’t focus on non-profits, the analysis in this article applies equally well to them.
Hello Andrew,
You’ve given me the confirmation that a blog is better off integrated into a company’s website, I thank you for that.
Here’s the situation, the e-commerce platform we use for our site is currently not allowing blogs. Do you recommend waiting for this feature to be available before starting a blog or have a blog created with WordPress or Tumblr and linked it to our web site right away?
Having a blog means time and efforts and I would like to get the full benefits from it.
Thank you in advance!!!
It really depends on your need and on how soon the e-commerce platform blog will be ready. If you don’t want to wait, you can’t go wrong with a WordPress or Tumblr blog, especially if you want a quick, easy, and widely accepted blog platform for your business.
Hi Andrew,
Nice article. You mention:
Integrating your blog with your website means the blog appears either at http://www.abcinc.com/blog (subfolder) or at blog.abcinc.com (subdomain).
(Of these, the subfolder option is better.)
Do you know if you can go down the subfolder path if you have a Tumblr blog?
Thanks!
Hi Richard – Thanks for your comment. Unfortunately, I’m not that familiar with the URL options in Tumblr. They may also evolve over time. I’d suggest getting in touch with their support team, which should be able to provide a quick answer for what they support today.
Hello,
Thanks for this post, that is very helpful. I have created my company website and now I’m about to launch the blog, and I asked myself the same question, should be on a separate subdomain or as a fubfolder. I asked myself this question, because I’m running my company’s website on wordpress, and I went for a complicated theme that I wouldn’t want to use for the blog that I’ll be using every day ! I think I’ll install a new theme for the subfolder, which brings me to the next question, is this possible ? having a different wordpress theme for a subfolder?
Anyway, I really appreciated reading your post, thanks again !
Elyes
Hi Elyes – My site is set up exactly as you describe. http://www.PrometheusInternetMarketing.com is a WordPress site, and http://www.PrometheusInternetMarketing.com/blog is a separate WordPress site with its own theme. This happened for historical reasons in my case. I’d prefer to use the same theme for both, but making that happen has been a low business priority for me. So, yes, you can certainly do it!
Could you please advise on why the subfolder option is better than the subdomain option?
Also, we are constantly publishing articles on our blog, which is currently on a subdomain. Does this still count as original content for our domain?
Hi Devon – great questions. I think that this 3rd party post I referenced can answer your questions best: http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/internal-linking-strategy/which-is-best-for-blog-seo-subdomain-or-subfolder/. Good luck to you!
Hi Andrew,
What a wealth of information. It’s great!
My question is, I have a blog that I am starting. Because I have a product that I am heavily branding, that website is a subdomain of the blog, e.g. brand.blog.com. You mentioned subdomains in your post, but didn’t go on to state any advantages or disadvantages of this approach. The plan is also to have more brands that offshoot from the blog….
Thanks!
Hi Grace – Thanks for your question. I had found a 3rd party article that did a great job of explaining the SEO tradeoffs of subdomain vs. subfolder, so I didn’t add anything else to it in my post. I just linked to the article instead. Here is the direct link: http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/internal-linking-strategy/which-is-best-for-blog-seo-subdomain-or-subfolder/
Hope it helps!
Andrew
Hi,
Thanks.Very well written post.wouldnt having a separate blog and having it backlinked multiple times to your main site cause the main site to be penalized due to the google updates.
Thanks
Rohit
Hi Rohit – Thanks for your question. No, there’s no inherent problem with having one of your websites link multiple time to another one of your websites. If the links makes sense and are made in context, then this is exactly the sort of linking that Google likes – it helps Google better understand the relationship and themes of various content.
It only becomes a problem if the site you are linking from is known to be spammy or if you are linking in a spammy way (for example, having dozens of links from one page with the text “FREE BEST BLUE WIDGET EVER CLICK HERE NOW!!!”).
Bottom line – if your content and links create sensible structure and help increase understanding for a relevant visitor, then you will never run afoul of Google.
As a real estate agent, there are so many options out there its hard to know where is the best place to present blog posts. Many use “Activerain” to blog while others use their own website, while others have separate blogs on platforms such as wordpress.com or blogger. I think that perhaps most importantly is being consistent with blog posts, and when you separate things based on “tone” or “branding” it may help with attracting a larger audience, but may also cause yourself to be spread too thin and discourage you from posting consistently. In the end I believe I will go with a single blog on my main website, to help make our website more of an authority in the eyes of google, as well as showing visitors that we are active and updated, while occasionally adding blogposts elsewhere to supplement and support our overall link structure as well as have a say on other platforms people may be browsing on (such as active rain). Thanks for the post.
Hi Andrew – I wonder if you can help me…our website https://www.dodopad.com has been around forever (1997!) and has undergone some changes in that time – most recently when we moved from Acticic shopping cart software to Magento in 2011. Our site has two ‘sides’ to it – static pages and the dynamic pages in Magento. On the home page a widget brings up ‘featured’ Magento products on a random basis – so anyone going to the home page might see a different set of products apearing each time they refresh the page. Around 2011 (maybe a little beforehand) we were advised to register dodopadblog.com and we started a WordPress blog and linked it on our home page. We’ve not posted as regularly s we probably should have but want to change that now. But no-one suggested then that having them separate was an issue. It now clearly is…as evidenced by an analysis that an SEO company conducted for us who are keen for our business. Before I decide on whether to go with them or not it would be really helpful to know if there is a simple way in which I can transfer the blog onto our site. I have access to Adobe Contribute to make edits (simple ones!) but I want to continue to be able to post on the blog via the WordPress platform . Can you help with some advice and what I need to do please? Thank you 🙂
Hi Rebecca – Thanks for your question. Unless there is something unusual in your hosting configuration, you should be able to simply create a sub-directory in your public_html folder (or whatever your host calls it), and then copy your wordpress installation there (you’ll need to update all links, of course). So, for example, if you name the sub-directory “blog”, then the new URL for your blog would be http://www.dodopad.com/blog.
This is exactly how I have my blog configured at http://www.PrometheusInternetMarketing.com/blog. It’s a WordPress blog within a sub-directory of a “separate” WordPress website. But to search engines, they are the same website.
Good luck with it, Rebecca!
Andrew
Hi Andrew, thanks for sharing this – am I correct in thinking that a blog can benefit homepage SEO because a) (as you mention) more pages = more authority – presumably it is therefore important that each blog post becomes a separate page in it’s own right and b) the generation of fresh content on the blog is also positively associated with the homepage ?
Hi Ben — Yes, you’d like to have each blog post as a separate website page (a unique URL). Search engines index content by URL. And when it’s clear that a page is about only “X”, then Google may show it when people search for X. But if you have many blog posts on a single page, then the page is instead about “X, Y, Z, A, B and C”, and unless those topics are closely related, you’re confusing search engines and wasting an opportunity.
Generating fresh content helps your overall domain which, in turn, also helps the ranking of your homepage.
thanks Andrew – some food for thought there. It is good to think that a blog can have positive to implications for a Website as a whole. I can also see an advantage to a single ‘blog page’ on closely related topics; easier to create more backlinks to, greater occurrence of keywords etc., The other option of course is integrating a blog with a homepage, which has potential benefits for the homepage, making it easier for it to be found due to the additional keywords/topics in the blog for example.
This for this article however it doesn’t cover the issue I’m dealing with so I hope you can help. In Google Wemaster Tools (Search Console) they list internal links pointing at a site’s pages and according to SEO reports I’ve seen lately you want you most important pages at the top with the most links. One site I’m working on that has an integrated blog has all it’s blog pages at the top but we need the website product pages ranking higher. This seems almost impossible due to the blog providing recent posts and an archive that goes back to 2011 so most of the blog pages have around 350 links each where there are only 68 pages on the main website. Is there a way to reduce the amount of pages the blog points to within the blog?
Hi Lorel – I think you may be thinking about this the wrong way. If your blog posts have strong structural interlinking, that’s great. It helps search engines understand what they’re about and makes them more likely to show your posts in search results. I wouldn’t try to reduce the # of links that your blog posts received.
Instead, I’d look for ways to increase the links to your main site pages, and your blog posts provide a golden opportunity. If your blog post is truly “integrated”, then it shares the same main menu, so already every post should have links back to your main site pages. The footer of each post should also link to your homepage, contact page, etc. But even better, look for opportunities within your posts to naturally link back to key site pages “in context”. This means that as you mention topic “X” in a post, link back to a main site page that covers topic “X”. That’s really the most beneficial type of linking (Google likes and rewards context). Also, depending on who is writing your posts, you may be able to have the author byline on every post include a link back to your About page.
In summary, don’t try to reduce the # of quality links to your blog posts. Instead, look for ways to increase the # of quality links to your main site pages. The rest will take care of itself.
Hi Andrew, thanks for the initial post and for the continued support for all. I’m just starting out as an architect and would like to expand in to other creative built disciplines with my fine arts background. I believe in the integrated blog/website as a means to be more efficient as well as directing viewers to my architecture or additional interests. Is there an ability to really push this concept to combine all of these media types together. For example, build a more static website that illustrates your work, while containing a blog subfolder page that allows for more active posts that is linked with facebook/instragram, so one can take a picture on their iphone and upload to their blog/facebook/instragram/etc simultaneously in one step? I have a website domain (suprblk.com) and a template chosen through cargocollective, but they don’t offer such integration being explored in this post. What are your thoughts and how would you go about this strategy? Thanks
Hi Michael – Thanks for the great question. I’m not familiar with CargoCollective. These days I exclusively use WordPress, which is the most popular CMS (content management system) on the planet by a long shot, and which has a plugin for nearly any special feature you can imagine. But if that doesn’t work for you, there may be other ways of creating the dynamic integration you’re looking for. For example, sites like HootSuite are designed to let you post to multiple social media channels at once. They may have an easy integration you can include on your current site to auto-create blog posts with these uploads. You may need to work with CargoCollective to iron out the technical details. Best of luck to you!
So I tried to scroll through to make sure that another one of the comments or questions didn’t address this issue and I didn’t see anything… so my problem is I failed to do extensive research before diving into a build-your-own site through sitebuilder.com and it wasn’t until after I was all done building my site that I realize I could not add images within the body of my blog posts. This is a bad situation for somebody in an image driven business such as mine-interior design. I am a startup interior design business and I can’t afford to have a web designer build my page at the current time so I had to do it myself. Though I love the ease of building a site through sitebuilder.com it was very disheartening to find that I couldn’t use any any images within the blog body. I used to have a wordpress blog and I’m strongly considering reinstating that with the other domain name that I own and adding it to my website but I’m not sure how to go about doing that have any advice? Thanks for all your help this is a great blog post!
Hi Christine — That’s surprising to hear that any modern website builder wouldn’t allow you to insert images into a page or post. Have you tried contacting their help desk? If you need to go the route of using a separate WordPress site for the blog, that’s straightforward. Just link to it from the main menu of your Sitebuilder site. And, ideally, replicate your full Sitebuilder main menu on your WordPress blog so that the visitor experience is more seamless, and they can move back and forth between the sites easily. Hope this helps!
Great article. Still a difficult choice for me but I’m leaning toward the separate blog to build independent credibility. My main company markets nostalgia shows to senior living facilities to help them regain memories via the music-memory connection. For social media marketing I am going to write a Senior Well Being blog that gives information on memory loss. I intend to add little references every now and then to the Memory Lane Shows to promote the business. What do you think? You can email me if you like.
Thanks!
Hi Curtis – Sounds like a great idea. If every 4 or 5 blog posts has a light mention of your main business in context, I don’t think that would turn off most readers. Just make sure that your blog is much more than that. And I would be honest in your blog byline about your relationship with your main company. Best of luck!
Andrew,
Quick question, we are thinking to build a website and a blog as subfolder. However, we’re thinking to use separate CMS for the site and the blog. Is there any disadvantages for keeping separate CMS?
Again we’ll put the blog in a subfolder of our site. Any insight will be helpful. Thanks a lot.
Marco
Hi, Marco. There’s no disadvantage other than maintenance. It’s more work to regularly update two CMSs (updates to core code, updates to plugins, updates to menus, updates to branding) than one, obviously. But I’m not aware of any difference that it makes to search engines. They only care about the ultimate HTML code rendered on the page and the url structure. So, there is no disadvantage from an SEO perspective.
Hi, thank you for this article! I am in the process of launching an updated website where I have also changed the url to give it a better branding (redirects are set up). I have integrated the blog and website but have kept two different domains for it. The blog trauma-and-ptsd.com and the website rolandbal.com
I am just thinking now, before launching, if this is really such a smart idea and if it might be better to keep everything under rolandbal.com for SEO/google mainly.
(ps. if you put ?wpok behind the sites you can get in). I would really appreciate your comment.
Best
Roland
Hi Roland – I took a look at your site(s) and can see what you did in terms of integration. You’ve duplicated the main menu and visual theme for both sites while maintaining separate domains. I don’t see value in maintaining that old, separate domain for your blog. From an SEO point of view all this content should be on the same domain.
If you make this change, be sure to create 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one so that any existing backlinks will still contribute to your new site’s SEO value.
Hi Andrew, while this blog post is old, the content is just as relevant today. I run a real estate property management website and have loads of content and media I’ve created over many years. Lots of professional photos and videos of daily life kind of things. I’m forced to put these items on a blog because of limitations for media on my website’s theme/template. I’m feeling stuck between using the age and authority of my website (doing a subfolder blog) – or – going with a standalone blog. I can focus on lifestyle content and also provide lots of great info on neighborhoods and districts of town, created on a ‘neutral’ website. I want to give my property management website the credit for the photos and the real estate-related info but want to do it the right way, keeping everything ‘white hat’ and hopefully getting lots of good traffic by focusing on giving people what they want. Any suggestions on what you would do to generate the most return on the time and effort? Thanks!
Hi Dave – It’s a lot of work to build up traffic and authority for a brand new blog. Unless you have a good plan for that, and can afford the months/years of effort required, I’d keep the blog in a sub-folder of your current, authoritative business website. This will help your blog get the most exposure to new visitors, and help your website get the most exposure to blog readers. Most people these days understand that most blogs have some sort of business tie-in, and they won’t mind it as long as you truly provide unique, helpful content. Best of luck to you!
Andrew, thanks for the reply. I gave it some thought and made the sane, reasonable decision to utilize the sub-folder blog method. It wasn’t easy but I had to be honest with myself and admit starting an entirely new site was noble but ill-fated. Your balanced examination at the pro’s vs. cons of this question gave me the nudge I needed to do the best thing. Sometimes you have to be willing to say ‘no’ to good things so you can say ‘yes’ to the best things. Cheers!
HI Andrew:
What an excellent article and much needed! I have a dilemma though. I have blog that generates a lot of traffic. I recently decided to add an ecommerce store to and sell products. The blog has always had a very high bounce rate, which I don’t necessarily think is a negative; I think my readers are getting what they on the page and leaving. I was selling some products in the store and then it just completely dropped to zero. I was told that it’s not a good idea to have an ecommerce store on a blog, because it’s hard to make money. My developer thinks I should to utilize the traffic on my blog for my store and just wait it out. I don’t think it’s to ever really do well sitting on my blog. So, I’m moving the store over to it’s own domain and just hoping that my store will eventually do as good as my blog. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Found your article useful. I am looking at moving my website due to existing issues and have 2 websites – business and blog. Trying to decide if should go to one website when I move. The blog does get occasional responses today – mostly spam. I am thinking combining both at the new site – would be better and easier for me to keep up with.
I have Three other domains. These domain have the Blog section and have unique articles, keywords pointing to my main website different pages.
is that allowed by google ? can it harm me?
Hi Andrew – Thanks for the informative and helpful article.
I’m working with a client who used to run a Blogger site in addition to their main website. All of their blog posts were on Blogger, and the “News” section of the main website just contained links to the latest articles on the Blogger site. The thought was that the external site with the backlinks to the main website would help boost rankings.
We recently redesigned the main website and know that these days its better to keep the blog posts on the main website. The Blogger site hasn’t been updated since 2012 but there are a lot of good quality posts on there.
I’m wondering if I should import all of the posts (or at least the good ones) onto the new blog and setup redirects from Blogger. And if so:
1. Should that be done all at once, or 1 or 2 a week?
2. Should the original post dates be kept, or should they be treated as new posts?
Thank you.
Hi Duane,
I apologize for the delay. I hope this may still be helpful.
Does the Blogger site bring your client significant/valuable traffic? If so, then I would leave the old posts where they are, and focus on creating new posts for the new site.
If not, then you can safely move over all the posts without losing traffic, and it would be valuable in the long run to do so. I would shut down the Blogger site altogether. It’s not valuable to have links from a post on the Blogger site to an identical post on the new site. Google will just see that as duplicate content and not award as much SEO value as you want for the new site.
Then I would treat the posting to the new website as if you’re publishing a new blog and just happen to have a repository of great articles to leverage:
– Make sure each post is still relevant (a lot has changed since 2012!), and update it accordingly.
– Update the date when posting. These are effectively new posts (new website, reviewed & updated curated content).
– Release them at whatever posting rate you plan to maintain for the long term (or slightly faster if you really have a lot).
Hope that helps!
Andrew
I found your very informative article while trying to find out if just publishing a blog on WordPress.com gives your blog the domain authority of WordPress. This is what I was told by an internet marketing company that supposedly gives you a few high-value backlinks by creating a blog on WordPress.com and then publishing an article with a link back to your website.
This doesn’t sound right to me! Is this a linking scheme like you mentioned in your article?
Hi Yvonne,
I’m afraid that will not work. Yes, it is a type of linking scheme that was often done in the past and used to work to some extent. But those days are long gone.
When you publish a new page on a website it effectively has zero SEO authority. Yes, it will inherit a small amount of authority from the domain itself, but not enough to help the page rank well. For the page to rank well it will need to have inbound links directly to that page from authoritative 3rd party websites. This is the #1 factor that Google uses to determine if a page deserves to rank highly, and you can’t cheat Google’s process.
Andrew
I was wondering if I go for the ‘middle ground’ option (having the blog at a separate domain but within the navigation of my main website) will this help boost the SEO of the main website still?
Many thanks for a great post!
Kind regards,
Maisie
Hi Maisie – thanks for your message. Linking from your main site to your blog site will not boost the SEO value of your main site. However, if you link from your blog site back to your main site AND your blog site has its own independent SEO value due to inbound links from other websites, then that would boost the SEO value of your main site. Does that help?
Best of luck,
Andrew
Hi Andrew.
Great post and responses to questions! We are considering moving our external blog to become a part of our main website. If we do this (copy all the posts to be on our main website blog and then delete the external blog) will this hurt our main website’s landing page rankings? We have links coming from our external blog, and I know internal links are not as helpful to domain authority as external links, but as you point out, a lot of external links from the same low-authority site isn’t very helpful.
We are wondering if our rankings will drop for a couple months, and then pick back up again from this integration? Or should we just keep our external blog with links pointing to our main site, and then start a brand new blog on our main website?
Thanks for the help.
Hi Dallin — If your external blog has valuable 3rd party links coming into it, then some of that link value is indeed passed onto your main website from your external blog. And that would be lost if you simply take down the blog site.
However, there’s an easy fix to avoid any lost link value. After you move all the blog posts to your main site, simply create 301 redirects (in a .htaccess file or similar, depending on your hosting server) from each of the old blog URLs to the new blog URLs, and from the old blog site domain to your main site domain. In this way all of the 3rd party link value will still get passed along to your main site.
Good luck with the big content move!
Andrew
Your article has hit close to home, and after reading all posts thoroughly I still can’t decide on which is best for my scenario. I live in a fast growing tourist area of Brazil, for which I started a site to do some affiliate marketing. It is still a work in progress… marautour.com that will sell (try to sell) hotel, car rental, air, etc. But the more I am learning, the more I want to create a more exciting brand for travel all over Bahia with a blog. I have the perfect blog name with the .com available.
After noodling through various scenarios, I am coming to the conclusion that the blog and its branding will get more traffic than the main destination website (marautour.com).
Should I:
a) launch the blog right away while the main site is still new, and incorporate the main site as just one of the destination under the blog umbrella (with future destinations to come)?
b) Or b) stick with conventional wisdom and put the blog as a subfolder in the main site for now, buy my “perfect” domain name, and if it is successful I could turn the website “upside down” in the future, putting marau.com along with other locations under the blog.com umbrella using 301 redirects.
c) Totally separate blog that leads to several separate monetizing websites.
My idea is to use the main site (marautour.com) as a template to be replicated in other tourist destinations in Bahia. I hope I made the question clear enough to understand, as I value your opinion!
Hi Rob — I’d suggest that you start out the way you want to continue for the long term. That makes everything easier. I’m not sure I fully understand the differences in the options you laid out. I wouldn’t keep the blog separate just because it may get more traffic than the main site (that’s common). I would, however, keep it separate if you plan to have many “main sites” and wish the blog to seem independent.
If I haven’t answered your question well, feel free to post back. And best of luck to you.
Andrew
This article was really helpful to me, and confirms my decision to keep my blog integrated with my web site. I used to have them separate, but for convenience and simplicity, I combined them about 3 years ago. Since then, I’ve been able to build more authority and also build my mailing list because people see my work and also read about what goes into it. I am currently in the process of changing the focus of my work, and the blog is a key component in that. I appreciate your thoughts on the topic.
I have just set up a blog in WordPress and have embedded it into my main company website. Is this a good idea will it help or cause duplicate content issue with the wordpress and the same blog integrated into my site.
Hi Natasha – Unless you are actually duplicating significant page content on multiple pages (whether on the same site or different sites), you won’t have any duplicate content issue. If you do have duplicate content, decide on which page it should exist and change or remove the other page.
Great perspective Andrew. You totally nailed this for me. Our CEO has unending high value content for our niche space (process engineering) and I was wrestling with the decision to launch a blog within our site or create a totally separate site. Your article made it pretty clear that we should have an integrated blog. Thanks again.
Glad I could help, Scott. Best of luck to you.
Hi Andrew, Thanks for sharing this article, I see it going from 2013 to 2016. I have the same dilemma. I started with blog but have now a site and the blog is integrated in blog.domain but don’t know how should I continue now. It looks like traffic is separate. Would it be better to make a news section in website and write article there? Or is it OK like it is and keep linking the blog with the website. What is best for SEO and traffic for my website? The other concern is that if we continue to put all articles in the website, I might need a huge space later on for the archive, while with blog this is solved. Please let me know your opinion!
Hi Alma – If your blog is on a subdomain then it is already integrated. I wouldn’t change anything at this point – just keep doing what you’re doing. Let me know if I misunderstood your question.
Hello!
I’m confused by some of the terminology after reading the above article, questions & answers. By hosting a blog to my website for better SEO, do you mean:
A. Having blog entries hosted directly on my server? Or…
B. Embedding a 3rd party blog, like Blogger or Tumblr to a page on my website?
Which are you suggesting is best?
-Thanks!
Hi there. I’m not sure I fully understand your questions, but let me try to answer. It doesn’t matter on what server your blog is hosted. It also doesn’t matter if you use a 3rd party blog or a built-in blog feature. What matters is whether the blog is “integrated” by existing at the same domain and in your website main menu navigation. Please post back if I didn’t answer your question.
Thanks so much for this post, it really assisted me in developing my son’s website and blog… we have decided to integrate his blog and website as one. Thanks again!
Thank you, and best of luck to you both!
Thanks for the informative and helpful article.
All of their blog posts were on Blogger, and the “News” section of the main website just contained links to the latest articles on the Blogger site. The thought was that the external site with the backlinks to the main website would help boost rankings.
Any good links coming into your website will help improve SEO rankings. However, the setup you described is effectively “laundering” links through Blogger, which reduces their effectiveness greatly. Any sites that link to one of the posts on blogger will pass along some SEO value to that post. But that only a portion of that value is further passed along to the main website.
Unless Blogger is providing other very significant benefits (like special promotion of the blog, etc.), you’ll find better long-term SEO value by keeping the content hosted on your own website, where it is fully owned and controlled by you, and where all incoming links fully benefit you.
Hi Andrew 🙂
Very well written article.
I did scan all the comments but didn’t see my Q,
but apologies if I missed it*
I’m looking at having blog, marketing and courses on my site.
I’m wondering if I can keep seo goodness while upping performance and clarity and simplicity of function by using one primary domain with functional subdomains with one wordpress host for each?
e.g. blog.mysite.com and courses.mysite.com and mktg.mysite.com
Greatly appreciate your insights and many thanks for sharing!
~ James
* Note: comment for this don’t appear to be in chronological order
Hi James – I appreciate your question. At the top of the post, in the yellow box, I linked to another blogger’s post that I thought did a good job of explaining the difference between using subdomains (your approach) and subfolders. Please take a look. I do think the subfolder option is a bit better, but it might not be a significant difference for your case.
Separately, if you expect to have enormous amounts of content on your site, then perhaps creating 3 separate WordPress sites would be organizationally easier for you. But if not, then it would most likely be easier to build and maintain only a single WordPress site. You can easily organize content under different sub-folders like “blog”, “courses” and “mktg”.
I hope this helps!
Andrew
I always had this confusion. Both are having its advantages. But these days people don’t type url and they only remember short names. i have hardly seen anyone typing xyz.blog.com which is hosted on another site. We have to promote both things together. It takes more time so I’m in the favor of having a blog in our own website. And I’m still searching for this option to create my own blog through coding.Currently i have made my blog and linked to my website which i don’t think is benefiting me.
Hi,
well, we are now at the stage where we wish our blog was under our main url. and in the transfer, we have been informed that we will lose all our social likes and shares.
is there a way to transfer:
http://www.blog.xyz.com/blog TO http://www.xyz.com/blog
AND transfer all the history of social FB, LI, TW… shares and likes?
Thanks
Hi Miki — Yes, you can do all that. The method of moving your content from (A) to (B) will depend on your website/blog platform. Once you’ve moved it, you can create 301 redirects (Google it to find instructions) to point your old urls to your new urls. By doing that you preserve all the incoming links and link value from other websites and social platforms.
Hi Andrew,
Great article and very helpful. I have a question regarding blog integration: What are the benefits of using something like WordPress, integrated into your existing website theme, over using a blog section within the website’s template?
People keep telling me to use WordPress but I am struggling to see the benefits (even if it is integrated) when the website template has a blog section that can be updated whenever I want to.
Many thanks
Ben
Hi Ben — If your existing website platform supports blogging, and includes all the features you want/need, then you should be fine. Most people use WordPress because it’s a top notch blogging platform (very robust, full-featured, easy to use) and it comes with access to tens of thousands of optional plugins that you can use to enhance your blog or website, most of which are free. Hope that helps.
Hi Andrew,
after some research, this is one of the best sources regarding this topic!
We decided to finally integrate our existing long-term EXTERNAL blog-project into our website for all the SEO-benefits mentioned above.
Still, our case is somewhat special, as we do have three different websites to integrate the existing (unique) blog into (three countries using the same language, nearly same content).
Would it in this case still be a good idea (duplicate content issues solved by hreflang etc.) or am I missing something?
Many thanks in advance.
BR,
Dexter
Hi Andrew
This is all new to me…
My company has its own WordPress website, I want to create a blog that i can share links to our Facebook page and our website.
Is this all possible? and if so, could you give me any advice on how to create this blog in such a way that it is integrated with the website (like yours)?
Hi Natasha — If you’re already using a WordPress website for the company website, then the blogging feature is ready to go. You’ll want to read up about the difference between “pages” (static website pages) and “posts” (blog posts). Once you have one or more posts ready to go, just add a “Blog” menu item to your site navigation that points to the main blog page, and you’ll be off and running!
Im wanting to make $ blogging by selling packages and such on my website and have youtube videos embedded in the blog on the same topic. Do you think i should have my blog as part of my website and have the youtube videos embedded? Thanks!
Hi , I have started my website recently . I am confused whether i should keep the blog section on the personal website or to buy a different domain name for the blog . I am a budding digital marketer and the blog will be around that itself. What will be the best option ?
Thanks for the very comprehensive article. I am doing the same thing right now. I have an artwork portfolio site which I branded based on my art style (line art). I call my site Lines of Lila. I have a blog integrated into it for the sole purpose of driving traffic and updating on my latest works. but at some point I realized that some of my blog entries were becoming too personal and running away from the key philosophy or concept of the brand. And I want to use it only to exclusively show off my paintings, talk about the art process, just concentrate on my painting style, and probably attract collaborators of the same art form. But I realized I also wanted to talk about other topics on art and share some news and my discoveries from the art world (including my personal art journey and philosophies) that may not be completely related to my art concept. So, I decided to create a separate blog using my name as the domain for personal branding purposes (and also to somewhat monetize it, which is something I do not want to do on my portfolio site). Also, through this separation, I can focus more on updating the creative process and updates on new artworks on my portfolio website’s blog (I changed its name to Insight, instead of blog), while at the same time driving traffic to it. I hope I made the right decision. By the way, I linked both sites on each, so it’s not really an integration.
Great article! I am still undecided which camp I should join (integrated vs separate) for my particular situation. Perhaps you can help.
My husband and I own a martial arts academy. Our business website is very simple. Home page, schedule & tuition rates, class descriptions, meet the instructors, contact us, etc.
Recently we have been discussing starting a Jiu Jitsu blog to create a stronger online presence and generate more revenue through content marketing, advertising, product sales (generic martial arts related products, not anything specific to our business brand), etc.
We have no intention of selling or leaving the company or the blog. I have a slight inclination towards separate domains due to different levels of geographical relevancy. What I mean by this is that the academy website is relevant only to people who live close by, whereas the blog should be relevant and accessible to anyone anywhere in the world that is interested in Jiu Jitsu.
Of course I would love to reap the added SEO benefits of the integrated approach, but I’m afraid that tying the blog (Internet scope) to our academy site (local scope) would somehow inhibit its potential or outreach.
Do you have any advice? Thank you so much in advance!
Hi Kendall – Great question. Geographical mismatch isn’t something I touched on in my post, and it is worth considering. However, even so, if it were me I would integrate the blog. This will bring the most SEO benefit to both parts of the site (the blog and the main site pages) as I discussed in the post. Plus it’s just much easier to manage one website than two, especially if you’re doing it yourself.
But I think integration will help elevate both aspects for your visitors as well. If I’m looking for a local martial arts academy online, I’d be more impressed with the one that has a great collection of authoritative posts on the subject. Conversely, if I were looking for a martial arts blog, I’d be more impressed by one that is grounded in a successful brick and mortar academy.
Either way you go, I wish you and your husband the best of luck!
Andrew
Hi Andrew, Great article, it’s interesting to see so many people contemplating about that significant dilemma. although I saw similar questions along the comments, my situation is still a little different. I have a portal that is basically all around cloud computing. there are articles made by me my partner and some of the portal members regarding professional and non professional experiences in the field, as well as a forum that anyone can ask a question related to cloud computing. Currently we offer our services in a designated “services” rubric in the portal site, but the majority of the site content and hyperlinks are still community oriented. We decided recently to open a new website to represent our consulting services, under a brand name the differs from the name of the portal, and with a more professional design. We can’t integrate both because it will drastically change the current essence of the portal and we might lose popularity accordingly (that’s our concern anyway). The question is whether we should redirect traffic to our new consulting site claiming this is our firm, or shall we just advertise it as a distinct business entity in the portal site? Currently the site publishes other advertisements, and our top priority is to still look like unbiased counselors in the field (not committed to work with a specific vendor) while promoting our consulting as the primary business.
Kind regards
Hi Gilad,
Interesting question. You can do both. You can place ads for your consulting business on your portal side alongside other companies’ ads. And you can also note appropriately on your portal site (perhaps on the About page, Contact page, etc.) that the portal is run by your consulting company. This provides transparency along with heightened advertising for your consulting services.
Best of luck to you!
Andrew
Thank you so much for such a detailed, organized, well-thought out and well-written article! Those seem quite rare these days, with so many amateurs posing as experts on the internet! As an experienced writer and website designer, I especially appreciate this article and the information is definitely helping me to make an informed decision on how to work with my own blog and website.
I do have one question, if you don’t mind. I didn’t quite understand the meaning of this:
“This approach provides most of the visitor benefits described above — They can easily find your blog and get to know your company better. The tradeoff is that you lose all the potential benefits of having a truly separated blog other than the ability to easily detach it from the company website later.”
I wonder if you could spell it out for me or perhaps give me an example?
Thanks!
Claire Amber
Hello,
I work for an IT Software and services company. We currently have our blog hosted on our own website. However, the website itself generates only 20-30 hits per day, and only a few blog hits per week.
We want to position ourselves as thought leaders in the industry (and we are, actually). I want to drive more traffic through our blogs. Is there some way to drive more traffic through our blogs? I have never used any blogging sites, but are there any popular ones that can drive traffic by pinning popular blogs or paying to promote our blogs in the homepage?
Thanks!
Hi Andrew, Thank you for sharing and helping others do their best! I’m a newbie and have just create by website on Wix that also has a blog tab. I really like my web domain name “MyCity”LuxuryHomes but I wanted something more catchy and interesting for the blog that I felt people could remember and had relevance to the community. I bought the domain IfYoureLuckyYouLiveIn”MyCity” which happens to be part of a saying in town. Something everyone knows. Yes, I did check to see if it was trademarked and it isn’t. Should I be using WordPress and integrating it with “MyCity”LuxuryHomes? Does it make sense to use IfYoureLuckyYouLiveIn”MyCity” or is it too long? I do have the branding fYoureLuckyYouLiveIn”MyCity” elsewhere on other pages in my website. Just seeking help to understand some basics (wordpress, subdomain vs tab etc.) on blogging and further understanding of the pro and cons of my options. Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Signed, Confused
Dear Confused — The answer depends on what you want your website and your blog to achieve for you. If you want each to help drive traffic and organic rankings for the other, and if you want simpler management, then I’d keep them together. If instead you want to develop each as a fully independent entity with its own unique purpose and branding, then I’d separate them.
For your other questions, if Wix is fully meeting your needs currently then there’s no need to switch. If you find you need greater flexibility and functionality, or if you want to engage in AdWords advertising or conversion tracking, then I’d move to WordPress. Your blog name seems meaningful, even if long, so it shouldn’t be a negative — remember that most people will get to your blog by clicking on a link rather than by typing in the name.
I hope this is helpful,
Andrew
This is super helpful thank you, I am pretty new to blogging as part of my website so good to have posters and to know Im on the right track!
Thank you for sharing this…it is really really helpful article.
HI andrew.
I know that you wrote this article a long time ago, but I still wanted to reach out as my head is spinning on this dilemma. I am currently developing an afterlife product , i want to create a blog but didn’t want to create content around death or over spiritual so my blog is going to concentrate on old age – Tips and tricks, feel good stories, all things positive. My question is when it comes to integration how does that work with the product and the blog? can you have a product website and feature a blog that concentrates on subjects leading up to death. I would love you get your thoughts as I stuck. This is such a sensitive subject that I don’t want to come across incentive or disrespectful.
Would appreciate your feedback.
THanks chantalx
Hi Chantal – Thank you for your question. I’m not sure I understand what your product is, but it’s generally very appropriate and helpful to have a blog as part of a product site. Doing so helps establish your authority, answer common questions, and increase your presence in Google search results.
More specifically for your case, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want to discuss death in your blog if your product is “an afterlife product”? Best of luck to you in figuring it all out.
Andrew
nice article with useful information thank you
This was very helpful to me as I am not fond of blogs but realize it is the way we are headed. So my concern was how i should put a blog on my site , whether it be subdomain or sub folder. I did not know that a subdomain was not considered part of main site and its own entity so that was very important to me. Much appreciated thanks.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for this article, it made me think twice about having a separate blog, however, I am still confused! I am in the jewellery industry and I want to start a blog in order to gain some credibility as a private jeweller and discuss trends/changes and help clients understand the purchasing process better. My company brand will be focusing on selling daily wear jewellery purely online – so it is a slightly different market and potentially different customer base. I am wondering whether I should merge the two or keep them separate. Initially, I did want to keep them separate, but then I was thinking of creating one brand whereby I can offer the private jeweller experience as well as sell ready made products, and this way I wouldn’t be launching two websites/social accs at the same time. What is your opinion? Thanks!
Hi Aya – Great question. What is your primary goal in running this blog? Do you want it to help drive new sales for your daily wear jewelry business by elevating your authority and bringing in new visitors? If so, I would certainly build it as part of the business website in order to maximize that value. I would only build it as a separate website if you wanted to grow it into its own unique business with significantly different customers. I hope this helps, and good luck! – Andrew
Came looking for benefits about the keeping the blog on myain house moving company website or it should be separate. So now I know that keeping them together will be great for my Expert Movers 🤗
Andrew,
I am in a bit of a pickle. I helped start a company that I do not own. I reap a percentage of the profits and an hourly rate when i work. This is a part time job that will hopefully turn full time when the customers come pouring in. When we started, my partner built our website (amateur builder). We are finding that our rank on google is not where it should be by far. So we decided to hire a professional website builder. The template i choose has a blog tab on it, so after talking to the website builder, i decided we needed to start a blog. I am the ONLY one that is going to be blogging (meaning my partners will not be blogging). I have told my partners that if i am going to do this for the companies SEO purposes, that if they were to let me go, or i leave, or the company goes belly up, that the blog would stay with me (in writing). So if i have that in writing, is it safe to put my full blog on the company website? How do i get my blog back if something were to happen? Should i have my own domain name or should it just “live” on the company website? I am at a stand still here.
Hi Jamie – I would imagine that if you have the blog ownership spelled out in writing you should be fine, regardless of where the blog is hosted. However, I’m certainly no legal expert, and if you’re concerned you should speak with a lawyer. Best of luck to you.
Hi Andrew.
This article is so well written and provided so much info. thank you! 🙂
Question I had was, say in case, I create a blog page on my website http://www.rajatshanbhag.com. is it possible in future, if I want to delete me website or some other criteria it needs to be closed down, can I transfer the blog page to WordPress.com ?
I understand the importance of integrating and how it will help the website in terms of google finding it. but I am also concerned about blog’s longetivity in case something happens to the website. any thoughts on this ?
that’s why I am stuck and confused between having a WordPress.com blog and just creating a link to it on the website menu, and/or integrating blog by creating a blog page on website .com/blog
thanks in advance 🙂
Hi Rajat,
Thank you for your question. It looks like there are ways to port an existing blog to WordPress.com should you want to. Here are a couple of relevant links I found:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/
https://wordpress.com/go/plan/import-blog-wordpress-com/
I hope that’s helpful to you. Best of luck!
Andrew
Andrew: Thanks for the insight. I have a slightly different question. I have a website and a separate blog on blogger.com. I was feeding my blog articles to my website before, but was told that duplicate articles would hurt their credibility (as far as Google as concerned). Hence, I stopped the feed. What do you think? If I am not ready to integrate my blog into my website, should I continue the feed to my website? Thanks!
Hi Paul – Yes, I think at best Google would prioritize showing the posts from blogger.com in search results and ignore the copies that appear on your website (assuming that blogger.com has more SEO authority than yours). Have you noticed that already when you search on phrases that appear in your posts?
So from an SEO point of view, the duplication is unlikely to help your website and *might* have some negative effects. However, you’d need to weigh that against the value of your website visitors seeing your content on your own website.
Hope this helps!
Hello Andrew,
First of all my respects for you to have been answering everybody’s questions for the last 7 years… I hope you still have energy for one more 🙂
My situation is a bit complicated:
On one side I started an Instagram Blog where I speak about a product I am developing as a data scientist. At the same time, I am showing pictures of my home setup. The idea is to slowly transfer all my followers to a personal blog I am about to create http://www.albertblog.com. In the blog, I am using many affiliation links from my setup elements and courses I am offering. Everything is really personal.
On the other side, the product I am creating and speaking about on Instagram needs to be connected to a company. So I got a new domain http://www.albertcomany.com In this website the product, other products and services as a data scientist are offered. Here there will also be a blog but related to data science.
As you can see everything is a big mixed up and present doubts:
1- I am not sure if having two websites is good or I focus on just one. I could not present things like my setup or personal believes in a company website though.
2- If I have both websites separated, I am not sure how to present myself to people. As Albert the data scientist from instagram and personal blgo, or as Albert the owner of the company that offers the product also from Instagram.
I think I went a bit out of topic but I believe it is still pretty related.
Thank you very much for your help,
Albert
Hi, Albert. I live to serve. 🙂
Speaking from experience, trying to create, maintain and regularly publish to two separate websites yields more than twice the headaches. Plus you end up half-crazed to boot, as you described.
If the topics relate, and it sounds like they do, I would find a way to best meet your various goals within a single website, focusing on business needs. If your personal blog generates business, then by all means integrate that content into your business site. If it doesn’t, and it’s just a passion of love, you can of course continue that separate blog (on the same platform or in some simpler form), but I would spend little to no effort on expensive web design or SEO improvements for it.
I’m assuming, of course, that like most of us you need to generate business income, and therefore that needs to be the priority. If you’re independently wealthy, then by all means do whatever makes you happiest! 🙂
Hope this helps a little. Best of luck to you,
Andrew
Hi, This is an informative article. Thanks for sharing your experience & knowledge.
If you thought a link from your blog to your website would help search engine rankings for your website, think again. Yes, links are very important to SEO — but combining forces into one website is much more powerful. A single link from your blog isn’t nearly as valuable as all the links your blog will get from other sites over time. By having the blog and the website on one domain, all your links will benefit the same website.