Optimizing blog domain for maximum rank/traffic potential

[jomosi]

Hello wonderful Moz community!  I need some advice.  Here is the situation:  I work in a small division within a much larger company.  We each have our own domain, i.e. www.parent.com and www.child.com.  We (the child) have a domain authority of 57, while our parent has a domain authority of 86.  Our blog lives on blogs.parent.com/child.  My understanding is that www.brand.com/blogs is better for SEO than blogs.brand.com (we had no control of directory structure decisions at the parent level).

Given all that, in terms of maximizing traffic to our domain, would we be better off moving our blog to www.child.com/blogs? Here are a couple of potential pros/cons bouncing around in my newbie brain:

a) By moving the blog to our domain, our whole site could benefit from having any external links our blog posts earn point back to our domain vs. our parent's domain.

b) On the other hand, leaving the blog on our parent's domain and then linking to our content from posts over there might give our content a boost.  (Of course, that theory is shot down if Google recognizes our parent/child relationship and doesn't reward our site with the benefit of linkbacks coming from our parent domain.)

What say you?  Are there other angles to this I’m not even considering?  If you think the right decision is to move the blog over to our site, any suggestions on how not to screw that up?  (301’s, etc.) Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

-John

[Toddfoster]

Hi John,

Your "newbie brain" is not deceiving you - the placement of a blog on your website for direct value to your brand is best practice.

The big questions I have are whether or not the information/content you would be placing on your blog would be directly relevant to services and/or products your parent company provides, and whether or not your parent company features their own blog.

This creates a foursquare dilemma:

1. Parent company has a blog, and Child company features blog on same domain (subdomain)

If this is the case, you are creating blog overkill on 1 domain and leaving your child company in the lurch. I don't suggest this.

2. Parent company doesn't have a blog, but child company does on its domain/subdomain

This is not a great strategy, as it dilutes your child company's website potential and creating links from your parent company to your child company will result in problems down the road. Google will find this connection sooner or later, and penalties may (will) result.

3. Parent company doesn't feature a blog, but child company does on its website

This is a slightly better outcome - the child company maximizes its ranking and traffic potential but the parent company is left in the lurch. This can create problems as the parent company should be represented alongside the child company.

4. Both websites feature unique blogs on their respective domains

This is really the ideal scenario. It keeps both companies separated (so no risk of penalties) but also allows them to maximize their ranking and traffic potential. This is what I strongly suggest if you want to be successful without risking long-term damage to your websites.

To answer your question directly:

#3 or #4 above are the options I would consider to maximize traffic to your domain. #4 has the added benefit of helping out the parent company, although if you don't have any say in what they do, it may not be possible.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any further questions.

All the best,

Rob

[erickcalderon]

Hi John,

I would go with www.child.com/blog

Here is why:

1. As you stated this structure ranks better due to your blog getting your domains authority.
2. As you gain page authority for your posts your domain will also benefit.
3. Your child content is most likely relevant to your child domain.
4. the way you have it set up right now you may not be getting the DA of your parent site anyway because it is set up as a subdomain. Double check but I believe Google sees sub domains as there own deal so the metrics for your main domain do not match up. Do some testing in MOZ OSE to check both your root domain, www subdomain, and blog sub domain you will see different values for DA and PA. You can also check this way on Majestic and your TF and CF will be different as well.

Strategy you may want to use is:

1. Move your blog to the child domain
2. New content should be posted here
3. You can syndicate the same post to the parent domain if you want, but make sure you use a rel canonical pointing to the original content at www.child.com/blog/post-name, that way you pass the credit back to the original post on the child domain and avoid duplicate content issues.
4. If you just want to get rid of the old blog, you can 301 the posts to the new post URLs, or rel canonical them pointing back to the NEW Original Content location at www.child.com/blog/post-name

Parent Child Relationship:
This is just my opinion based on what I have encountered. If you are a manufacturer, and you have multiple brands, it is totally ok for you to have a Manufacturers website, and websites for each of your brands. Think of Proctor and Gamble, they have a P&G website with pages that spotlight their brands, and then they have individual sites for each of their brands. The P&G parent site links to all of its children. I am sure it passes authority that way, but each of the brand sites have also built their own authority.

I believe the thing to look out for is, if you are building other sites to focus on brands or products, like P&G does, you should be fine. But if you are building child sites just so you can build links, like a PBN (private/public blog network) then you run a chance of getting a penalty. Just be careful and make sure you only try to get credit in one place and I think you will be all good. I am sure others have other thoughts on that, so you just have to make your own decision and track your progress to make sure you are getting the results you need.

Let me know if you have any questions, we have built the parent child relationships above before and it has worked great. No penalties and we are able to control most of page one for the traffic bringing brand related queries.

[jomosi]

Thanks Robert and Erick for your quick and thoughtful answers!  Robert, to clarify based on your foursquare dilemma, we are currently in situation 1) and it sounds like we ought to move to situation 4).

Erick, regarding the point you make in reason #4 ("the way you have it set up right now you may not be getting the DA of your parent site anyway") -- It appears that in terms of DA, www.parent.com and blogs.parent.com are the same.  However, the TF and CF for blogs.parent.com are significantly lower than www.parent.com (and lower than www.child.com), so I think your point is valid.

I hear what you're saying regarding the Parent/Child relationship and the need to be careful.  I think our situation is very much analogous to the P&G example, so I think we'd be fine.

Thanks again to you both for the great insights!