How to best use our blog posts for SEO?

[KHCreative]

My company recently created a WordPress hosted blog.  It is hosted completely separate from our company site.  The primary domain for the blog is blog.mydomainname.com, but we immediately created a folder within our company website for www.mydomainname.com/blog that has a reverse proxy to the blog itself.

I'm curious though if we should consider taking the content from the blog posts and re-creating that within our company website as well?  The blog posts are very good SEO rich content, and we always struggle to find new content to put on our company website as it is already.

Would like to get some folks thoughts on this.

Thanks!

[josh-riley]

I'm working on something similar right now and have a few random thoughts: I'm not a fan of using the same content; aside from duplicate content issues (and nobody wants to deal with those messes), what's the value for end users? Why read the blog if it's going to be on the site? Or, why have a blog if you're going to put the same stuff (even if it's only some of it) on the site? Obvious, but for a successful blog it's critical.

Linking from the blog to the site, etc. makes a lot of sense for SEO/link juice and there's plenty of benefit there.

It's not a one-course-of-action scenerio. I've been building the business case for how we should handle ours since our site technology doesn't allow for hosting a blog. Sometimes it a bit of the lesser of  the evils, but ultimately there's still plenty of good to get from it.

[Dr-Pete]

I guess it depends on why this is on a separate domain at all. If you have the technical capacity to host the blog content under your company website, then in 95%+ of cases, I'd move the blog. Unless there's a clear need to brand a separate domain or legally separate the blog from the company website, having a separate domain is just splitting your authority. All the links that come to your blog are going to just funnel into 1 linking domain to your main site. If that content was on your main site, you'd have dozens or (down the road) hundreds of linking domains instead.

If it has to be separate, than I agree with Andrea - I wouldn't copy it. You're setting up duplicates and confusing your potential audience. In general, though, I'd want to understand why you made the split. Fully integrating them has much more bang for your buck, SEO-wise.

[KHCreative]

Thanks for the response!  We did try and initially host the blog under the company website, but our CMS just couldn't support a blog that we were satisfied enough with to use.  The powers that be that are controlling the blog decided to go with a Wordpress hosted blog.  To try and still get as much SEO value as possible, I am in the process of setting up a reverse proxy from www.mydomainname.com/blog to the blog itself.  My understanding is that this will allow the search engines to treat the blog as part of our overall website and still get the SEO content value from each blog post.  I know it won't be quite as good as hosting it directly on the website, but I'm hoping this will be close.

I think I have decided to just advertise the blog on the home page of the company website, and NOT duplicate any of the blog posts.

[Dr-Pete]

Oh, sorry - I thought the blog was on a separate domain and you were just setting the reverse proxy to change it from "blog.domain.com" to "domain.com/blog". In this case "www.mydomainname.com" is actually the main site, right?

Done right, that should work - as long as Google sees the blog as a sub-folder of the main domain, the physical separation across servers shouldn't matter much. People separate out servers for all kinds of legitimate reasons.

[KHCreative]

Yep, www.mydomainname.com is the main site.  Thanks for your help!

[josh-riley]

Selfishly, this was a great thread to get involved with. Our domain can't handle a blog so we have to do it similar to how Mike does - and ours hasn't launched yet, so I got some good confirmations to work with so we maximize the opportunity as best possible given our limitations.

So, thanks for asking, Mike. And, thanks for answering, Dr. Pete!