Should I move my blog from subdomain to subdirectory?

[Jessdyl]

Hi there,

We have a pretty strong organic presence on our consumer facing blog. Around 5.7 million organic clicks Year to Date. It's currently housed in Wordpress on a subdomain.

Our team is considering migrating our blog from Wordpress to Sitecore, where our parent organization resides. With that consideration, we're trying to determine if we should preserve the subdomain or move to a subdirectory of the parent brand. Moving to the parent brand would also result in a loss of our custom global nav - we would inherit the global nav of the parent website.

We're not concerned about traffic loss risk - we know that we'll lose some but we think the move to subdirectory might be more beneficial in the long run from an SEO perspective. We're mostly concerned about the users getting lost without the global nav specific to the blog.

Thoughts/concerns?

Thank you!

[RossKernez]

Hi there,

You should move your blog from the subdomain to a folder on your root domain. For example blog.website.com -> website.com/blog. Since Google treats all subdomains as separate entities or sites you are partially losing  SEO equity because it is getting distributed between subdomain and root domain.

[KevinBudzynski]

Google is good at understanding the relationship between sub/primaries via linking and etc.  and some of the issues may be more of server response time for the sub and etc.

I agree w/Ross--I prefer directories. However, if the structure has been around a while and migration is difficult,  I don't see a huge benefit in migrating. Also, I believe there are some ways to use .htaccess that you can rewrite a subdomain to the directory.

See this video from Google's John Mueller for more information.