New my domain.com/blog option vs. my blog.mydomain.com option

[josh330]

Our e-commerce site has been on Big Commerce for about a year now. One thing many SEO folks had told us is that having a blog located at /blog was going to help more than a subdomain blog. option.

BC has never had the option to have a blog hosted on their platform (/blog) until now.

I am now wondering, since we have lost traffic in the past and are trying everything we can to regain it, if we should purchase the Wordpress Site Redirect upgrade and move the subdomain blog (blog.) to the new site option /blog.

Any help or feedback from you is very much appreciated.  I have attached a screenshot of our main website vs. our blog from Open Site Explorer in case it helps anything.

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[DistanceLC]

The big difference, as far as SEO is concerned, for a subdomain blog (blog.) versus a directory (/blog) is how the link credit is attributed. Search engines see a subdomain as a completely separate site. Any backlinks you get to your blog content will only benefit your subdomain blog. When the blog is a directory it is an extension of your main domain. When you have it set up that way and build content the backlinks received for the content can help build the domain authority. I personally prefer to setup blogs as /blog and would recommend that method although I have also seen people successfully have subdomain blog setups as well.

[josh330]

So that begs the question, do we switch this existing blog to the /blog address now and redirect old posts? I am assuming all new posts should go to the new /blog area.

[DistanceLC]

Yeah, I would 301 redirect all of the old blog articles to the new blog articles.

[josh330]

Thanks Jennifer! The only thing I am not sure about is how to do that. Our blog is hosted by Wordpress on their servers so I don't know if I can upgrade or something and then redirect.  I know there is also a WP Site Redirect upgrade I can purchase from WP for $13/year.  Maybe that's the way to go?

[Alex-Harford]

Google now class a subdomain as pretty much the same website as the main domain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk - so backlinks to the existing blog subdomain will also benefit the overall domain.

I didn't know this until last year either - it'd be useful if Google updated their help pages!

If I was you josh330, I'd only move to www.example.com/blog if the cost and hassle isn't much for you. Although a subdomain and subfolder are considered roughly equivalent to Google, I'm not sure how other search engines see it.

[Travis_Bailey]

Bump for truth.

[josh330]

Thanks Alex.  I will have to look at how big of an undertaking it will be I suppose.

I guess I am trying to figure out if all new posts should go to the new /blog area and leave the old blog where it is.  Another concern of mine is that our blog is simply the free generic template whereas the new /blog area looks like our site because it is part of our site.  Not sure if I relayed that well or not.

[Alex-Harford]

You made complete sense. Is there no way of updating the old blog to your site design?

A few questions you could ask yourself to figure out if it's worth moving to the subfolder and leaving the subdomain where it is:

Does the old blog get much traffic?
Does it have many links and shares?
How old is it and how many posts are there?

Despite that, if you do move to /blog the best case scenario is still to 301 redirect old posts to a new unique URL for each post if you can.

From what you say I'd also think the new design will look more professional and therefore, potentially lead to more sales.