Is it better to have a blog under your main website's domain or should the company's blog have its own domain?

[Linda-Vassily]

Is it better to have a blog under your main website's domain or should the company's blog have its own domain?

And if the blog is on its own domain, do links to the main site look good or bad to Google?

Thanks! (And please feel free to add any other related advice you might have...)

[TakeshiYoung]

It should be on the same domain if you want links to your blog to benefit your main site, and vice versa. If you have your blog on a separate site, Google will treat them as two separate sites.

[JoelBurke]

example.com/blog

In most cases would be recommend**.**

J

[NakulGoyal]

Linda, if the content on the blog is going to be a very very targetted content for your website audience, I would suggest putting it on yourcompanydomain.com/blog.

Also see:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-a-separate-domain

and

http://www.seomoz.org/q/subdirectory-vs-subdomain

I hope these help.

[Linda-Vassily]

Thank you for your responses!

I have a corollary question- if the blog is on a different domain does that make links from the blog to the main site more valuable (because they are not internal links) or is it a negative (seen as unnatural link building), assuming the blog ranks decently on its own?

And if the answer is still that it's best that the blog be on the parent domain, what would be the best way to move an existing outside blog in?

[NakulGoyal]

If your main domain ranks very well, and your blog on a separate domain and separate IP ranks well (presuming the blog has link juice of it's own), here's what I would consider:

1. How competitive is the niche you are trying to rank ? I am presuming it's finance based of your profile.

2. If you created 2 articles, similar topics and posted 1 on the blog and 1 on the website, which would rank better and why.

If the page on your site outranks your blog page, for same/similar keywords, you should consider merging the blog into your main website and do 301 redirects from the blog to your new URL.

EG:

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/blog/$1

I hope this helps.