Company Blog Vs External Blog

[Paul78]

Hi there,

We write articles for our blog on a regular basis, maybe two times per week. One of those articles I usually place on an external blog first getting some external links pointing into my product pages and using a rel canonical on that article on my blog pointing to the external post, so that the external post get's all the credit. The reason I put this on my blog is I use this to point to from my email marketing activities.

The question is, do you think this makes best practice? trying to get more out of this blog post.

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Gary,

Both tactics have their advantages and disadvantages. You do get inbound links from your external blog, but you also need to consider the benefits of using the blog on your site. When a  reader goes to you can get the traffic on page. When a reader goes to your site, they can potentially become a customer.

I think the response by Jeffery Tull here http://www.seomoz.org/q/which-is-better-for-linkbuilding-internal-or-external-blog really sums up the pros and cons of your practices.

Best of luck

[activitysuper]

Build the blog onsite, your domain will get the benefit from the unique content helping overall rankings, you can still build your internal anchor text links, if the content is good enough your pick up shares/likes/tweets (social signals) and maybe even some backlinks from other blogs resource sites.

[Paul78]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, it's really trying to get more out of the article by placing it on an external blog for backlinks then having it on our own blog for our visitors ie email marketing activities etc. My feeling reg SEO is that I can get more link juice from the external blog.

I think what Jeffery talks about is something a bit different,  I am talking about doing 2 things for the one article, this is something a bit different. He also says "If your write great content, you can earn links from external sites, which is potentially more valuable and seems to be what you are looking for." Using the practice that I am doing is surely doing this, although not naturally, but still achieving the same affect.

[Dr-Pete]

Ultimately, you're only get links from one additional site (the number of links is far less important than your linking root domains), and it's very likely Google will see the connection and not value those links much - they won't penalize it, but they may turn down the volume. Meanwhile, you're basically splitting your back-links, social presence, and promotional efforts. Any links to the external blog are all getting funneled into one linking domain. If you pointed them directly to your main site, you could actually have more links, in Google's eyes. I can't say that there's never a situation where I would house a blog externally, but it's rarely a plus for SEO.

[Paul78]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your reply.

So do you advice on hosting these original articles on my own blog rather than an external blog? If so, does that mean that internal links have more value than external links? What If the external blog post was high authority?

Thanks