Subdomain vs Subdirectory - Specific Case: A big blog in a subdomain

[Marcus.Coelho]

Hi.

First of all,  I love MOZ and learned a lot about SEO by reading articles here. Thanks for all the knowledge that i received here.

I read all the articles about "Subdomain vs Subdirectory"  in the MOZ community and I have no doubt that subdirectories are the best option for a blog.

But, the company that I work now has a blog with more than 17.000 articles, 1.000 categories and tags, hosted on a subdomain structure.

The website has a Domain Authority of 78 (I am working to improve these numbers)  and the blog subdomain has the same (78). We had 2.7 million hits per month in the blog and 4.5 million hits per month in the site.

I am advising the company to change the blog structure to subfolders inside the domain, but I'm finding resistance to the idea, because the amount of work involved in this change is enormous and there is still the fear of losing traffic.

My questions are:

Is there any risk of losing traffic with the amount of articles we have?

What do we probably get if we change the blog structure to subfolders? Could we have increased authority for the domain? More Traffic?

How can I explain to my superiors that we would probably have increase traffic for our keywords?

Is there any way to prove or test the gains from this change before we run it?

Thanks in Advance.

[seoelevated]

One of the advantages of migrating a blog into a site's structure is outside of the realm of SEO, but can be helpful in making a case to do this. I have migrated several blogs into sections of existing e-commerce sites, as "resource centers". These were not pure migrations, but rather restructuring of the content into pages whcih co-exist with merchandising on the e-commerce site. Here, the advantage is that once a visitor is attracted to a content page on the site, they are more effectively converted into an e-commerce prospect. This is especially true if the blog articles are restructured to include merchandising elements. But even if not, if the only difference is that the visitor is now on a site whose navigation structure includes all of the e-commerce merchandising, they are more likely to convert on such a site. So, the benefit is more about converting customers than attracting visitors.

One way I've tested this is to pick a relatively valuable single page, and migrate just that to an on-site page, with a one-to-one redirect. You will have to wait past an initial period where both of your pages may co-exist in the SERPs. But once the old blog page drops out and the new page comes in, then you can test the longer-term impact. Again, the number of visitors may actually be smaller, but you might more than compensate for that by converting more of those visitors.