Ask HN: Blog on blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Blog on blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog

14 pointsdawie10 comments

I know this has been asked before, but I can't find it. Which is better for SEO: blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog? Also, is it ok to host my blog on wordpress.com and not loose out on the SEO?

View on HN

Short answer: it depends. /blog is better if you just want more pagerank for your main domain, subdomain is better if you want to build your blog into something important on its own.

A subdomain blog with good pagerank also gives you the ability to add heavyweight links to content on your main domain when you'd like to drive traffic to specific areas.

I'd use a subdomain, because I like flexibility and because I don't give a shit about the SEO tricks du jour.

I second this choice. Although it obviously hangs on how often you want to post and how related to your www's concept/product your posts are, the benefit of Google treating it as a 2nd site is tremendous. The site: handler becomes more useful, you have the potential of the subdomain showing up as a second result cluster in search results.

Also, no disrespect to any other posters, but a new company/site blog likely has 9 months before it starts to earn enough link-juice to need to worry about spilling some...

It's better to use domain.com/blog for SEO reasons. You should also have a look at other hosted blog services. There are plenty of options around with TypePad, Blogger or even Tumblr. Squarespace is a good solution too because they let you import your data from Wordpress, Typepad etc.

Check out http://iwantmy.name/a for an overview of blog services that offer a custom domain option.

The only reason to use blog.subdomain is if you plan to host it seperately, e.g. on another platform (PHP or windows or whatever), another server (Wordpress has security issues some might worry about) etc.

Otherwise, subfolder is either better (SEO) or a no score draw (everything else).

This is easily the single most important question a nascent organization faces. Get it wrong and every bad thing ever mentioned in a chain letter will happen to you and each of your collaborators, many times over.

(Honestly, I doubt it matters much, but blog. is my [slight] preference. In any event, it isn't difficult to make one redirect to the other, and it's wise to do so, whether the Google juice the other answerers mention is important to you or not.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503079

My searchyc.com query was '.com/blog'

I would have expected that query to return bucketloads of submitted stories as opposed to the meta discussion about /blog.

Whichever is easiest for you. My site is just a collection of interlinking subdomains anyway, so blog.domain.com is best for me. Then I use a simple one click wordpress install on hostgator.

You can always proxy the /blog on your primary domain, so that BOTH URLs point to the same place. So you end up with both /blog and blog. With the same content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com