Blogs are best when hosted on domain, subdomain, or...?

[vernonmack]

I’ve heard the it is a best practice to host your blog within your site. I’ve also heard it’s best to put it on a subdomain.  What do you believe is the best home for your blog and why?

[EvolveCreative]

Technically, you're loosing a very very small amount of link juice by hosting it on a subdomain. The optimal configuration is www.domain.com/blog.

Source - SEO Secrets (great book by the way)

[vernonmack]

Thanks for the quick reply...I have the book - and it certainly is meaty !

I have been going about the way you describe (www.domain.com/blog) just wanted to get some re-affirmation after hearing from (what I think) is a reputable source that subdomain is better.

Everyone on board with this approach or does anyone have a strong argument against?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Subdomains are a dangerous choice unless you know exactly how to deal with them from a high level SEO perspective because it's too easy to miss all sorts of issues.

Just one example (and it goes way beyond "losing a very very small amount of link juice):

Even though you get the SEO value at the root domain level even in a subdomain scenario, since you use www for the main site, that itself is considered a subdomain.  So the main site (the www subdomain) still doesn't get all the strength value from new content, inbound links, and social mentions for the blog subdomain.

Even then, if you were to switch to domain.com (and redirect all www.domain.com to that), the most value/strength/trust signal value comes from self-contained.

There ARE exceptions to this under very specific and narrow circumstances.  For example, if you have an eCommerce site, and your blog is not focused on your products, but instead, is more informational in nature revolving around other topics (such as the manufacturing process in your industry, or how consumers use products (not just yours), etc.), having the blog on the main domain tree could potentially dilute the ecommerce value of the main site.

Again though, the need to get it "right" is just not worth the effort of splitting them out in most situations.

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[vernonmack]

Thanks for the expanded explanation!  Onward and upward then...

[bradkrussell]

Rand agrees with this approach too - just check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites/

"Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."

There's also this: http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/blog-hosting-external-subdomain-subdirectory-best-seo/ which may help as well.

[VivaArturo]

Agree that blogs are best in a sub folder BUT if you have an ecommerce site it is best practice to have your blog on a subdomain

This is purely for security reasons, if your wordpress blog gets hacked, the hackers will not gain access to your eCommerce site as it is on a different server

[mytouchoftech]

Just because you have WordPress running your blog, doesn't mean WordPress has access to edit the files of the main eCommerce site.  You can install a standalone WordPress blog in examples.com/blog and have regular HTML files serving example.com

You can also takes steps to secure your WordPress installation on top of this.

[VivaArturo]

Andrew while I agree with what you say, is there not a greater risk if your blog is hacked and then a hacker may gain access to the server where as on a sub-domain the blog can be on a different server?