Blog on subdomain?

[AdAdam]

Hello, I am going to add a blog to my site.
I use cloudfront CDN to host my whole site (its a 1 page parallax type thing now)
With cloudfront I can not easily do dynamic content but it is possible.

So I have a few options

blog.mydomain.com pointing to a regular server
www.mydomain.com/blog/ uploading static html pages for my blog, its a slight hassel but not too bad

What could be best for SEO? will having blog.mydomain.com be seen that much differently to google? are they smart enough to see it as just another section of my site?

Another spanner in the works is that I have a domain for australia and a totally different domain for international sales with no content or structure duplication between them
Could I maybe be better off with a myname.wordpress.com blog and linking it to both my domains?
There are a ton of spam wordpress blogs so I am not sure what would be best. My blog will not be intended for just SEO purposes.

[customerparadigm.com]

Adam -

This question has been a big topic in the past.

The general thought is that:

blog.mydomain.com --> content on the blog. is treated as a different site, and SEO efforts (content, inbound links, social media) only help the subdomain.

mydomain.com/blog --> subdirectories are usually the way to go.  All of the content, inbound links and social media shares will help build the overall domain authority for you.

My recommendation is to go with the subdomain, and there are a whole lot of articles that back this up:

http://moz.com/community/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-best-practices

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

http://moz.com/community/q/best-place-for-a-blog-blog-mydomain-com-or-mydomain-com-blog

For the static vs. dynamic content:  I would recommend the subdirectory structure, even if you have to have the pages published statically.  Although it's more of a pain, static pages will load much faster for your end users than dynamic ones, so you're essentially putting in a full page caching mechanism.

Hope this helps...
-- Jeff

[Alex-Harford]

Jeff's answer is good with regards to the sub-domain/folder debate but,

"My recommendation is to go with the subdomain, and there are a whole lot of articles that back this up:"

I think he meant subdirectory?! That would be my recommendation anyway.

One big problem with uploading static HTML files is that if you redesign your site and want historical content to match the redesign, you'll have to update every single HTML file.

There are also lots of high-quality Wordpress blogs so that's not really an issue. www.mydomain.com/blog/ is the way to go if you can. Whether to have it on your Australian or international site depends on which audience the content is aimed at.

[customerparadigm.com]

Yes... I typed a bit to quickly.

Thanks, Alex... my recommendation is the sub-directory, http://www.domain.com/blog/ as the best practice.

Thanks!

[AdAdam]

Thanks and yes I thought you were saying Subdirectory.

It makes sense to me and google always changes its mind but an actual part of the site there is no chance of googles view changing like it could with subdomains.

Redesign is not a problem, Im pretty good with linux tools like "sed" and with regular expressions. I may even roll my own PHP template generator, seems faster than learning one of these static site generators that people use for static blogs.

Wordpress is a little slow, I have my own server that is very under utilised and even with an empty database WP ads around 400ms of lag

[edmundsseo]

I thought Google stopped treating subdomains as separate entities? In the follow video, Matt Cutts says that they're essentially the same as subdirectories now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk&feature=youtube_gdata

Have you seen evidence that shows otherwise? Not challenging your answer here; I'm genuinely curious.

watch?v=_MswMYk05tk&feature=youtube_gdata

[Alex-Harford]

Thanks for pointing that out - I had no idea. In the video Matt Cutts says subdomains are "likely" to be treated like subfolders. The change was also confirned here: http://www.seroundtable.com/subdomains-google-webmaster-tools-13960.html

I wonder how other search engines treat them? More research required...

[customerparadigm.com]

As an update, here's a link to the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet by Moz.  They do recommend the www.domain.com/blog:

http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition

Thanks!

• Jeff