Online Marketing - Marketing Don

Blog As a Subdomain Or Subcategory? The Final Word

I have been trying to figure out a definite answer to this question for almost a year now.  I have read probably hundreds of arguments back and forth with people within the industry argue why one is better than the other.  The problem is, the debate pretty much ended up even.  About half said go with the subdomain and the other half said go with subcategory.  I have come up with a conclusion.  If you don’t want to read how I got to it, go to the bottom of the page and read the conclusion paragraph.  If you want to see how I ended up with the conclusion, read on.

It started back in May of 2007 when I asked on Search Engine Watch forums.  I asked

 “There are many ways to add a blog to your corporate site: sub-category (domain.com/blog/title), sub-domain (blog.domain.com), a new domain, etc..

I would like to hear everyones opinion as to which is best and why.”

Highlights:
I would think the sub-category.
1. you would increase pages of your site
2. you would increase quantity and quality of backlinks to your main site (if you create good posts for people to link to)
3. sub-domain would not be good because it is treated like a different domain in the engines.
4. seperate domain name would not be good because all the links going back and forth, then engines find out they are on the same IP or same owner, they may penalize one of the sites/pages thinking something strange is going on.”

Other Highlights of forum thread

I think you are correct… those pages will be stronger under a developed parent domain (www.domain.com/blog/topic) and will increase content and potential SERP results within your site.
I see no value in launching it as a separate domain or sub-domain…

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Just a slight disagreement here based upon extensive experience with Corporate Blogs. I think the Sub-domains are the way to go, for many reasons - not the least being that they are easier for end users to remember than directories. A lot of traffic from Blogs can come from a sales force out talking to prospects sending them to a blog. It’s easier to say blog (dot) mycompany (dot) com than mycompanyname (slash) directory (slash) blog or somesuch. If you still want to use a directory, make sure its at the top level.

Also, sub-domains are great for internal linking purposes. I’m not going to go into the whole theory behind this, but believe me, it works.

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For a company blog, we always opt for a totally different domainname for several reasons :

You can use the authority of your company site to launch your blog.

It’s far more easier to get links from and to get cited on other blogs if your blog is not on the company domain. It looks a lot more natural.

When multiple languages are needed, you can start multiple blogs and have the advantage of interlinking them.

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we are leading the pack in our niche of SEM with blogging. We have tried setting the blogs up both ways - on a subdomain and in a sub-directory. We have much more success with the subdomains.
because our site is so complex with many pages already, we found our newsletter blog pages were competing with other informational pages for possibly the same keywords. By setting up subdomains we have 2 “sites” ranking for the same keywords.

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I then asked on Gooruze and found another, even older, thread on search engine watch

Three of the answers stood out.  The first was from Andy Beal. He wrote
“So both options are great if you want your blog tied to your company brand. Neither of them work well if you want to build a blog that might stand on its own two feet.”

If the blog is mostly designed to add content to the main site, with all the SEO benefits, go with the subfolder setup.
If you don’t care about the SEO benefits, go with the subdomain.”

Second was from Duncan Riley. “Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re trying to add traffic to a main site go with name.com/blog, if you’re looking at building a destination in itself go with blogtitle.name.com. Google considers subdomains as separate sites for memory.”

And the third was from Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Watch from a post on January 12, 2005.  Danny writes

“I generally advise people pondering the directory versus the subdomain/new domain question as follows:

1) If there’s substantial content you have that somehow warrants in your mind, and to your users, the need to have an entirely new web site, then go for having it under either a subdomain or new domain.

1B) Why do a subdomain over a new domain? First, it’s free. Second, you might like the consistency with branding.

2) If you have content that really fits with your main site, keep it in a subdirectory.

OK, so now I’ll take SEW as an example, since that was raised.

Our main site with original content is searchenginewatch.com, of course.

When we started the forums, they could have been searchenginewatch.com/forums. However, I thought the content and activities of the forums were important enough that they should have their own site.

In particular, people in my view tend to bookmark or treat sites with a little more respect if they aren’t full of slashes  In other words, making the forums as a subsection of SEW makes cause a few people not to perhaps bookmark it as readily, link to it or see it as standalone from the site itself.

For a pure SEO point, having it on its own subdomain means that it’s possible more pages will get indexed than if it were within a single site, since all search engine will spend only a certain amount of time within any one given site. Having your own home page at a root level may also help the particular topics central to that page perhaps rank you a bit better.

We also have a blog, blog.searchenginewatch.com. It was put on a subdomain for the same reason — substantial content different from the main site and with reasons warranting having its own site.

I have a long standing “webmasters” area about how to do submission, http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/. Why not make that webmasters.searchenginewatch.com or seo.searchenginewatch.com? The content isn’t substantial. There’s 10-15 pages total within that section. It’s a natural part of our main site. There’s no overriding reason to put it on its own.

FYI, we also considered doing something like sewforums.com. If we’d done that, we’d have all the same exact advantages of having a subdomain. Being a subdomain still for the major search engines seems to operate as being exactly the same as a completely different domain — which makes sense, as it is (all domains that end in .com are, for example, subdomains of .com itself).

As further proof of this, some noted when we launched that the site’s home page was PR3. Now I really, really, really don’t encourage people to worry about PR values — and I certainly don’t. But if forums.searchenginewatch.com were somehow seen as connected with searchenginewatch.com, you’d expect it would have been a higher value like the root domain itself. That didn’t happen. Only recently did the score rise, which I would assume is due to external links helping it rise over time (the blog, in contrast, started off at something like PR6 — links from the blogging world probably pushed it up more quickly)

Why not do sewforums.com? We didn’t for branding reasons. We wanted the domain name to be consistent with our main domain name.

You can also look at Google itself for examples of this. Google Images at google.com/images? No, images.google.com — and news.google.com — and froogle.com/froogle.google.com. Substantial content different from the main site that warrants being on its own domain/subdomain.

In conclusion, I come back to my standard advice for many things SEO — do what you think is best for your users. If you think it helps to have your site broken into subsites, do it. If you think you should link between them, as long as you are really doing it in a way that makes sense to human visitors, you should be fine.

Here’s a last warning sign. When you start doing a diagram of your interlinking and pondering really detailed questions of “if I do X, will that help or hurt with search engines,” that generally means you aren’t thinking from the human perspective.

In your case, if your products and services are really distinct — and they really have substantial content about each product, then the Intuit idea of quicken.com, turbotax.com, quickbooks.com and so on model may make sense.”

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Most recently, on May 13th, 2008 I met with Ben Wills to discuss this issue as well.  He was pro subdomains and I was pro subcategories.

Almost all of the issues and benefits from threads above came up.  One of the bigger debates was possible crosslinking issues.  Ben brought up the main points above in favor of subdomains and it all made sense based on the sites he was referring to.  He also focused on Google and Googles algorithm.  I also mainly focus on Google due to the fact that they have the largest market share, however I do not dismiss Yahoo, MSN, and other 2nd and 3rd tier engines. While working with different agencies, I have gotten company sites unbanned from Google and Yahoo.  Everyone of the sites that I worked with that were banned in Yahoo had crosslinking issues.  Multiple sites, on same IP, with hundreds of pages crosslinking to the other sites.  I have not seen these issues with Google, though Google does state “excessive” crosslinking is not allowed.  A subdomain is considered a separate domain.  Will Yahoo, MSN, and other understand the site owner is not trying to be deceiving or understand these sites are legitimately related?  Is it worth taking that chance?
After discussing the pros and cons of both, I came up with the conclusion below.

CONCLUSION

Whew, that is a lot of info.  To conclude, there is not a definite answer for everyone.  There are factors you must ask yourself about your unique site and what your end goal is.

In my case, I am going with the companyname.com/blog.  Why?  We have an ecommerce site.  There are thousands of pages with products that other sites and manufacturers sell.  Some products must include descriptions given by the manufacturer.  This leads to duplicate content between our competing sites because they are doing the same.  We try to add information and tweak the information we get, but are very limited to the changes we can make.  We need unique, fresh content to our site.  Therefore I am opting for the subdirectory approach.

There are many things to consider when adding a blog. 

What is the goal of the blog?
Will you have it in several languages?
Does your current site need unique content? 
Are you using the blog for branding purposes? 
Will the content of the blog coincide with the products or services on your main site? 

Once you find out these answers regarding your sites,  and read this post and forum threads thoroughly, you should have a good idea on which way you should go.