877-490-8324Your blog is a huge part of driving your search engine rankings up and establishing your company as an industry expert. Many companies don’t know this, but where you post your blog on your website could have a direct impact on your search engine optimization.
Subdomains and subfolders are treated equal by search engines most of the time, but there’s some controversy as to whether one may help your website rank higher than the other. So how do you know whether to put your blog in a subfolder (www.websiteaddress.com/blog) or on a subdomain (blog.websiteaddress.com)?
Why do some websites use subdomains?
Some businesses decide to post their blog on a subdomain because they may already use other subdomains for different pages on their website (such as help.websitename.com or support.websiteaddress.com,etc. Subdomains help to organize web content into distinct sections. Unfortunately, when you’re using your blog as a form of content marketing and not just as an informational area, you can end up dividing your search engine rankings from your IP address.
For example, let’s say you own a auto repair business and you’re trying to increase your SEO footprint and backlinks to get online traffic and conversions. If your blog “blog.autorepairshop.com” is on a subdomain of your website “www.autorepairshop.com,” there’s a chance that search engines will be confused and could penalize you.
Although your blog and main website have different subdomains, both websites have the same second level domain (SLD). This puts search engines at risk of separating a large portion of keywords under your subdomain, which produces undesirable results like diluting your website’s backlink strength.
What makes a subfolder better for SEO?
According to some industry experts, subfolders are the best place to have your blog for SEO purposes. This is because of the different metrics being returned by various search engines.
However, subdomains do have their benefits. They can be great for foreign language variants of your main website and for content that’s thematically different from the rest of your main website.
Subfolders (/blog) are the safest bet for SEO ranking because they’re linked directly to your main IP address. This means whatever traffic and backlinks your blog receives, your main website receives those same backlinks and web traffic. Search engines are less likely to be confused, and they won’t compromise your backlink strength and penalize you.
Also, data suggests that users are more familiar with subfolders. Even if you don’t have a direct link to your blog on your main website navigation, many online users will be able to type “/blog” into the IP address to get your website’s blog. And, after all, SEO is all about increasing visibility.
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