Setting up your new company blog. What’s better for SEO? Hosted solution, new domain, subdomain, or subfolder?

Posted: January 8, 2009    By John Rodriguez    With 7 responses

I see this question come up quite often.

People ask where they should set up their new company blog to maximize their blog’s SEO effectiveness. Answers are always varied and mostly, in my humble opinion, incorrect.

To take full advantage of the search engine optimization benefits of setting up a new company blog, there’s only one answer.

But first, how does a blog help with your search engine optimization efforts in the first place?

It’s all about backlinks.

When it comes to SEO, there are two key areas on which to focus — on-page optimization (optimizing your web pages and site code for relevant keywords) and link building. Building backlinks to your website is important because the search engines (particularly Google) use the quantity (and quality) of the backlinks to your website as an important ranking factor in the formula they use to rank the sites that show up in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

By posting quality content on your company blog, people who read your posts will be more likely to link to your posts if they see value in them, and feel that they would be of interest to their own readers.

Quality content = More backlinks to your posts = Better search engine rankings

Where You Should Set Up Your Blog

For setting up a new blog, you’ve got two options:

  • Use a hosted service (Blogger.com, WordPress.com)
  • Install blog software on your web server (We love WordPress! – WordPress.org)

Remotely Hosted

Google’s Blogger service does allow a self-hosted option where you use the Blogger interface to post to and manage your blog and give it access to your server via FTP, but we’re really interested in software that you can install on your web server.

Hosted In-House

If you’re installing the blog software on your own server you’ll also need to decide where to put it:

  1. Register a new domain for your blog (www.yourcompanyblog.com)
  2. Put the blog in a subdomain (blog.yourcompany.com)
  3. Put the blog in a subfolder of your main website (www.yourcompany.com/blog)

For search engine optimization, hosting your blog on your own domain will have the most benefit — assuming you’re using your blog to help your optimization efforts for your main website (www.yourcompany.com).

Subdomain vs. Subfolder (The Subfolder Wins)

When you (or your web developer) set up your blog, make sure to set it up in a subfolder of your domain instead of as a subdomain — www.yourcompany.com/blog instead of blog.yourcompany.com.

Remember, the #1 SEO benefit for setting up a blog on your site is the backlinks that you get to your blog posts. If you set it up as blog.yourdomain.com, the search engines see the subdomain as a separate site entirely, and your blog backlinks will not add to the overall link popularity of www.yourdomain.com.

Putting your blog in a subfolder means that links back to your blog posts will count towards your whole site’s link popularity.

Search engines don’t only measure the number of backlinks you have to your website’s homepage. They also count the number of backlinks you have to the subpages of your website, including your blog posts. Having more backlinks to your website’s subpages helps to increase your deep link ratio (we’ll cover that in a future post).

If you were to use a hosted blog service like Blogger (with your blog at yourcompany.blogspot.com), this would have minimal benefit to your main website SEO.

You could build backlinks to the Blogger hosted blog and build up its authority, then link to your main site from the blog, but why bother. Cut out the middleman…

Don’t make this SEO Mistake

In discussions on where to host a company blog, I’ve seen people recommend setting up both — signing up for a hosted blog service as well as installing blog software on your server. Don’t.

That would double your workload as you’d need to have unique content for both. You wouldn’t want to duplicate posts on each blog, as this would result in duplicate content, and you’d also be splitting potential backlinks to posts between the hosted blog and the one on your domain.

Finally, hosting your own blog also allows you to maximize your SEO efforts by using a variety of plug-ins and software add-ons. You can’t do this with a Blogger or WordPress hosted blog.

Questions or comments? Let us know!

About the Author

John Rodriguez


John began his illustrious internet marketing career way back in the early 90’s. He's had many of his own profitable online businesses and has worked alongside some of the best online marketing gurus in the business. He brings not only all his SEM strengths, but also his tech savvy flair to SALESWORKS.

  • saravanakumar

    Really great article! I wish I had something like this when I started using blogs.

  • http://www.lancashireroseblinds.co.uk Rose

    So are you saying that having a blog on your site is better? For example we have Google Blogger and WordPress neither are linked to our site, should they be?

  • http://www.salesworks.com/ John Rodriguez

    Rose: Yes, absolutely. One of the benefits of blogging is it allows you to build up your backlinks if people link to your posts.

    Having your blog on your main site can also benefit your store. Posting informative articles like how-to’s will keep people on your store site and add value.

    If your articles start to rank in the organic search engine results, you’ll be able to bring in new potential customers.

    Ideally, you should consolidate both your Blogger and WordPress blogs together and move everything to a self-hosted WordPress blog on your site at http://www.lancashireroseblinds.co.uk/blog/.

    At the very least, you should link to your main site from your external blogs.

    I did some quick research, and moving your blogs to your site looks pretty straightforward. You’ll need your web developer to set up your self-hosted WordPress blog on your site, then import both your Blogger and WordPress.com blogs.

    Here are a couple of helpful links for your developer:
    http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/05/move-your-blogs-from-blogger-to.html
    http://www.blogbloke.com/migrating-redirecting-blogger-wordpress-htaccess-apache-best-method/
    http://www.premiumthemesreview.com/how-to-move-from-wordpresscom-to-a-self-hosted-wordpress-blog/

    Good luck with the move!

  • http://www.orionblinds.co.uk James

    Great post and i couldn’t agree more. Blogging is essential to increase the overall value of your website. When you couple this with intensive link building, i.e. build links to internal pages for long tail keywords you will eventually rank well. The industry i am in is extremely competetive as are many so the need for blogging is bigger than ever. In my opinion you still cant beat leaving the bulk of your seo to the professionals.

  • http://www.osbornebrook.co.uk Osborne Brook SEO

    Interesting article.
    We shouldn’t overlook at the benefits of having a blog outside your domain as that would increase your pagerank (inbound links are more beneficial that internal links). Also, I do not agree that having two blogs is not a good idea as it is not neccessary to have identical (duplicate) content. You can keep in the external blog deep links to your website and in the intnernal one you make sure you have keyword-rich text. I havn’t tried it but I’ve read that it works.

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  • seocompany delhi

    Thanks for all of your work on this web page. I am looking forward to reading more of your posts in the future.