Which is best for blog SEO: separate domain, subdomain or subfolder?

When it comes to your blog SEO, which type of domain is the best option? We've taken a look.

Where you host your blog relative to your main site is one of the more important decisions involved with setting up a blog.

If you get the decision wrong, you may fail to get the hoped-for SEO benefits you have worked hard to convince your colleagues about. But, if you get it right you can almost immediately see new, incremental visits you wouldn't have attracted without the blog.

The three main blog hosting options

The three options are straightforward. Let's take some examples:

1. Subfolder - http://www.domain.com/blog e.g. http://www.econsultancy.com/blog

2. Subdomain - http://blog.domain.com e.g. http://blog.zopa.com

3. Separate domain - http://www.newdomain.com e.g.  I can't find a good example - can you?

So which is the best blog hosting option for SEO?

I often ask this question in my SEO classes and ask for a show of hands to see what folk think. It's a bit of a trick question since there is no right or wrong answer - it depends whether you or your colleagues take a short or long-term perspective. That said, most people say Subfolder is best and this is what various Tweets and Facebook comments on a recent question on subfolder or subdomain in the Smart Insights Linked In Best Practices group showed.

But you can argue each case, particularly if you look beyond SEO at branding benefits you may get from a separate domain. Here are the pros and cons as I see them. What do you think?

1. Subfolder

+ Google will crawl new blog posts typically within days of launch.

+ Blog inherits the authority of parent site so can rank immediately for terms within posts.

+ Backlinks and social mentions generated by the content on the blog can help other content on the domain i.e. product pages rank more highly.

+ Integrates better with the main site for better user experience (although often will have a different design).

+ Easier to track with Google Analytics - a minor point - see the end of the post.

- Doesn't help generate external backlinks for which you control the anchor text, e.g. editorial links within blog copy.

2. Subdomain

+ Maybe technically easier for some setups.

+ Has some of the benefits of the subfolder in inheriting parent domain authority and separate domain in providing backlinks to the main site, but...

- Needs to establish its own reputation through backlinks from other sites so...

- Will not rank as highly or as quickly as a subfolder.

3. Separate domain

+ Helps you control and generate external backlinks for which you control the anchor text, i.e. editorial links within blog copy back to category and product pages.

+ Can create a more differentiated brand identity that can be seen as independent from the main site so it generates more engagement with its audience potentially.

+ Can target a different country, i.e. I have seen UK companies launching a US-hosted blog.

- You may not rank competitively at all for weeks or months depending on the quality of the content you create. This may be hard to sell to your colleagues investing in it - it's an act of faith...

- Will require a long-term commitment to content creation and backlink development.

So, to summarise 1 is the safe option, but if you create exceptional content that creates a lot of backlinks then 3 can be valuable in providing links back to the main site from a separate authority site you control. What do you think?

“Access

This Quick Win is for any business blogger who wants to grow their traffic and build a loyal following. Your business blog is a great way of showcasing your brand's expertise, but you need to create the right content and utilize promotional strategies to keep people reading.

Access the

An "experiment" to test subfolder vs subdomain

In 2008, before we launched Smart Insights I set up a new WordPress blog to replace my legacy blog, which backs up what I'm saying.

Initially, I set it up on a subdomain http://blog.davechaffey.com.

I pointed all my run-of-site nav links at this sub-domain.

I think I felt that the longer-term benefits of being on a sub-domain and pointing back to the main site might give some SEO benefits.

I used this earlier discussion on Subdomains vs subfolders for SEO to inform my decision. There's clearly no right or wrong answer.

After a week it was in the index, but not featuring for any three-to-four keyword searches, so I lost patience and 301 redirected the sub-domain to http://www.davechaffey.com/blog and changed all the run-of-site links and links from other sites to this new address.

Within four or five days, I was starting to appear for long-tail five or six keyword searches and within a fortnight appearing on the first page for blog titles/shorter searches.

So based on that, I'd recommend subfolders is the way forward for blogs if you want to swiftly pull in visitors based on the authority of your existing domain.

That'll be obvious to many, but I wanted to trial it and that's what I've found.

Subdomains and subfolders for Google Analytics

When I taking my Google IQ qualification recently I thought of another minor benefit of the subfolder approach.

Since Google Analytics serves first-party cookies for each different domain or sub-domain, this will mean that sub-domains aren't tracked as part of an integrated whole site. But they are integrated if they are part of a subfolder.

With a subfolder as the one on this site, it's recommended that a profile is set up with an include filter for a subdirectory ^/blog/ so you can still isolate traffic for that part of the site.