Business blog: integral to, or separate from, business website?

February 5, 2015 6:08 PM

Right now, my long-established business web site has a blog as an integral part of the home page. I've heard that, for SEO purposes, it's better to have the blog as a separate standalone URL with (obviously) links to the business web site, as well as links from and to the business Facebook and Google Plus pages. What are your opinions, hive mind? Have at it. And thanks as always!
posted by charris5005 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Assuming you are blogging about business related stuff, consolidating that content at one URL is going to do more for your SEO than spreading it around. The fake incoming links from your own blog trick doesn't work anymore. Google got wise to it.
posted by COD at 6:53 PM on February 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've heard that, for SEO purposes, it's better to have the blog as a separate standalone URL with (obviously) links to the business web site

This is very outdated advice.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:01 PM on February 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Quality content should go on your main site. These days, the thing that will hurt you is if that same content appears elsewhere.
posted by Candleman at 10:35 PM on February 5, 2015

All of the above folks are correct. It is generally best to have your blog in a separate sub-directory (www.example.com/blog) rather than on a subdomain (blog.example.com) so that any incoming links are pointing to your main domain.
posted by pmann at 11:06 PM on February 5, 2015

Best answer: Google's own Vanessa Fox answers your exact question:

Say you decide to start a blog about widgets to share news and information about the widget industry to augment your original e-commerce widget site. How do you structure the blog? Do you place it as part of your original site, or do you place it on a subdomain or separate domain? Three common choices are:

• Existing site: widgets.com/blog/index.html
• Subdomain: blog.widgets.com
• Separate domain: widgetsblog.com

In the past, some search marketers may not have gone with the first option, to have it be within an existing site. That’s because it meant there was no opportunity to get more than two listings on the same page. Instead, historically, putting the blog on either a subdomain or a separate domain meant it would be treated as a completely different site, allowing the marketer to potentially pick up a third or even a fourth listing on the page.

Now that’s changing. Google is no longer treating subdomains (blog.widgets.com versus widgets.com) independently, instead attaching some association between them. The ranking algorithms have been tweaked so that pages from multiple subdomains have a much higher relevance bar to clear in order to be shown.

It’s not that the “two page limit” now means from any domain and its associated subdomains in total. It’s simply a bit harder than it used to be for multiple subdomains to rank in a set of 10 results. If multiple subdomains are highly relevant for a query, it’s still possible for all of them to rank well.

Matt Cutts talks about this a bit more in his blog and in this interview with me and Mike McDonald on WebProNews. For instance, for navigational queries such as “IBM“, it’s likely that the searcher is looking for pages from the IBM web site, and in fact, even with this new change, the first two results are from ibm.com (likely hard stop limited to two due to host crowding) and three other results in the top ten are from ibm.com subdomains.

(See source for more detail).
posted by rada at 6:43 AM on February 6, 2015