SEO advice with having a blog on sub domain.

[9868john]

Righto, so:

I've been working on our company website www.nursesfornurses.com.au which is built on .asp which is a real pain because the site is built so messy and on a very dated CMS which means I have to go back to the dev every time I want to make a change.

We've made the decision to move the site over to Wordpress in stages. So, (and I hope logically), i've started by making them a proper blog with better architecture to start targeting industry related keywords.

I had to put it on a sub domain as the current hosting does not support Wordpress http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/
The previous blog is here: http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blog

Its not live yet, so I'm just looking for SEO advice or issues I might encounter by having the blog on a sub domain. In terms of user experience, I realise that there needs a clearer link back to the main website, I'm just trying to work out the best way to do it...

Any advice / criticism is greatly welcomed.

Thanks

[StelinSEO]

Hello,

Thanks for your question. My advice is to keep your blog on your main domain, not separate it to be a subdomain.

The reason for this is a subdomain is it's own separate entity and you won't get the benefit of the authority that's part of your main domain, and blog posts should be relevant to a service and internal link to them. For example, how this post links to the Nurse CPD page (except I'd use Nurse CPD has the anchor text, not the brand name in this case).

Matt Cutts wrote about this in 2007, and I think the information is still valid. In his post, he stated that his preferred use of a subdomain was to separate out information that is completely different. For example, if you had a staff portal, this could sit on a subdomain as it's purpose would than the information on your main website.

Hope this helps!

[EGOL]

Stelios gives the technical details.   Now for the encouragement....

For all of the work that you can put into a website, you owe it to yourself to ditch a host, a CMS, an SEO, a developer, a technology or anything else that forces you to run a blog on a subdomain.

[9868john]

Thanks for your responses, and I agree that we need to move host but its a pretty big thing to do and in our current situation it will take months to redevelop the site completely to Wordpress so we really have to do it in stages.

I did notice in the Matt Cutts article that: news.google.com would be suitable on a sub domain, so perhaps this will apply, also we've added a fair amount of content which was previously in the members area.

If I setup 301 redirects on these pages would this not pass the page authority to the new blog?

Thanks for your responses, this situation is looking tricker than ever!!

[9868john]

I noticed in the Matt Cutts article that: news.google.com would be suitable on a sub domain, so perhaps this will apply...?

we've added a fair amount of content which was previously in the members area so in some ways this is a separate entity

If I setup 301 redirects on all the blog pages pages would this pass the page authority to the new blog pages?

[David-Kley]

If you are looking for the fastest way to do this, just clone and backup your existing WP site and database, then move to your test environment and start building your new site there. That way you will already have all of your old blog posts in place, and save a ton of time, especially if the blog has been styled to look like the main URL.

For the blog, I agree with others in stating you should keep it as part of your main website. Doesnt make sense to have it on a subdomain unless you have to, like your old ASP configuration.

[9868john]

So If i move the content of the current blog:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blog

To my subdomain: 
http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/

Should I be expecting to see a decrease in rankings, even if I do 301 redirects from all the blog posts to the new ones..?

I'm just trying to get this as black and white as possible for my directors.