Comments on: Blog Hosting for Best SEO: External, Subdomain, Subdirectory?

By: Karen

Karen — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:46:49 +0000

Thank you so much for this article and great information. My issue is that my main ecommerce website is hosted with Volusion. Volusion does NOT host blogs in the subdirectories, so there doesn’t seem to be a way for me to do mysite.com/blog. I currently have my blog on a completely separate domain with only links cross referencing the two.

The blog is about 3 months old and gets results in the serps. The website is 1 month old and also getting results, sometimes on the same page of the blog (which seems fine).

Am I better off keeping the blog as is, or creating a subdomain to my main domain. My main concern is that I don’t see myself updating much content on my main domain, so i wanted to use the subdomain as content. however, i also understand that google may view the sub as a different site anyway!

What is your advice on what I should do?

By: timware

timware — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:25:26 +0000

I think you actually can install WordPress on a IIS server, as long as it runs PHP. If you’d prefer to have your WordPress on a Linux server, but have it associated with your primary domain, I’d say the best way is to do a subdomain that maps to the Linux installation.

By: British East India

British East India — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:08:24 +0000

Hi, thanks for this, its made the decision for me however, heres my issue, any help would be appreciated. Ive already got my website built in ASP.net and now we want to add a blog on the end like you say /blog , obviosuly we dont want to install wordpress on our IIS server, but we do have linux hosting elsewhere, so where/how do i create the redirects so that the blog stays in the same URL??

By: Importing Blogger & WordPress.com Blogs into WordPress

Importing Blogger & WordPress.com Blogs into WordPress — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:48:34 +0000

[...] a previous post, I discussed the SEO implications of choosing where to host your blog — in a subdomain, separate domain, extern…. My conclusion, was that hosting your blog in a subdirectory of your primary domain provided the [...]

By: bethany

bethany — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:13:05 +0000

That’s a really great post. We had our blog sitting in a sub-domain and it was hardly being used/found. Since we moved it into our subfolder we’ve seen both our traffic for male and female models increasing dramatically as well as our conversions. Many thanks!

By: Barrett

Barrett — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:43:15 +0000

Thanks again!

I think what I will do is install & upload my blog to both blog.mydomain.com & mydomain.com/blog, maintain the domain mapping, & redirect everything from blog.mydomain.com to mydomain.com/blog. Does that sounds like the best approach? Thanks!

By: timware

timware — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:36:23 +0000

The domain mapping just allows you to use URLs that *appear* to be under your primary domain but are actually hosted at wordpress.com (or blogger.com, etc.). You can't map a domain to a subdirectory. If you want to keep your blog at wordpress.com, then the domain-mapping to your subdomain is the only option. When you create links to your various posts and/or pages, make sure you use the subdomain URLs. Or if your blog isn't ranking that well anyway, you could just take the hit, set up WordPress under a subdirectory of your primary domain, import your wordpress.com data, and start fresh. Some think that Google considers subdomains and subdirectories as equivalent these days, but I believe this is only in terms of "host crowding" ... where a domain is allowed a maximum of 2 results on a SERP (search engine results page). Up until a couple years ago, Google considered subdomains to be completely separate from the primary domain, in terms of host crowding, and it was possible for a single domain to dominate a SERP by having its various subdomains also ranking on the page, particularly for more "long-tail" search queries. So Google now "considers" subdomains and subdirectories equivalent when it applies host crowding to a SERP. But this equivalence may not be applied when Google considers backlinking to subdomains as opposed to sudirectories.

By: Barrett

Barrett — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:30:07 +0000

Thanks again for your response.

I already have the domain-mapping option to my subdomain: blog.farawayflyfishing.com, but it won’t let me map to a subdirectory. Any hints? Thanks again!

By: admin

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:45:08 +0000

Yup, that changes the game. However, wordpress.com does offer a domain-mapping option to redirect your blog pages. But it's not really what you want. You have to pay $10 a year. And your blog remains hosted at wordpress.com, and your subdomain points to wordpress.com. The other option is to put a text widget in the sidebar of your wordpress.com blog with a link to re-direct to your new URL for the blog.

By: Barrett

Barrett — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:01:32 +0000

Thanks for your reply,

There is a detail that I forgot to include, and will probably nullify the information you gave me.

I realized that I actually have my blog hosted by wordpress.com, and it is mapped to my subdomain. I’m trying to get everything running off my server in a subdirectory. Any suggestions there? Thanks again.