Blog migration

[bnulab]

Hi

We have 4 websites - 1 for company and 3 for each products. Currently all our blog posts are located on the company website company.com/blog.

We will be separating out the blog so that product blogs will be in each product website.

i.e. from company.com/blog to:

• company.com/blog
• product1.com/blog
• product2.com/blog
• product3.com/blog

This is with the aim of helping SEO for each of the product websites; and improving user experience so users can easily navigate around the product pages if they are reading a blog post on the product.

So now we have to consider migration.

We will migrate/copy over all blog posts to each of the relevant product websites, but should we:

A. keep the old blog posts on company.com/blog and do a rel=canonical

B. only show blog preview on company.com/blog which will link to the new product.com/blog (and using 301 redirect)

C. 301 redirect all blog posts from company.com/blog altogether

Any suggestions on which of the above options to take would be greatly appreciated in terms of SEO and other considerations

[AL123al]

My preference would be for B. This is because the company blog is well established and so will have a lot more traffic to it so your blogs there are going to get seen and read. By showing an excerpt you are avoiding duplication but still driving traffic to the new website blog. Showing an excerpt on the company blog will entice people who are interested enough to click through to the new blog who may not otherwise have seen the article.

Option A is least favourable for me because the search engines will still have to crawl the blog article on the old website so is wasting crawl budget on that site. Also, the move you are making is permanent and that is what a 301 tells the search engines. Th canonical tag is letting the search engines know which is the preferred URL to index. You really want to move the blog articles and then build new fresh links and traffic to them on the new website.