Is there an SEO advantage to blog content being a child of /blog/ rather than the homepage?

[MillyShaw]

I'm working on a website where all the blog content is listed as separate pages from the homepage, eg:

www.domain.com/first-blog-post
www.domain.com/second-blog-post

However, it would make my life easier if all blog content was listed under /blog/ so that I could analyse it better in Google Analytics. Eg I'd like it to be:

www.domain.com/blog/first-blog-post
www.domain.com/blog/second-blog-post

The developer is not keen because it would create extra work for him, and he's also said it's a bad idea from an SEO point of view. But is this the case? Presumably with 301s in place it wouldn't make a difference?

Thanks for your help!

[richdan]

A small amount of Page Rank will be lost for each extra level the page is from the root domain.

So, there may be a small advantage in using the format www.domain.com/first-blog-post as opposed to www.domain.com/blog/first-blog-post

The effect is likely to be more noticeable if the home page of the site is the page with most link authority

[DirkC]

While I agree with the concept of Danny's answer (the farther content is from the root the lower the possibility of ranking) - there is no relationship between the depth of an article & the structure of the url.

To put it extreme - a url like mydomain.com/folder/subfolder/subsubfolder/page could be at 1 click from the homepage & a url like mydomain.com/page could be at 5 clicks from the homepage.

I would migrate to the structure you propose:domain.com/blog/post.htm, mainly because it's easier for reporting purposes. You can find an interesting article from Bruce Clay here on why it's good to have a well structured url: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/

rgds,

Dirk

[MillyShaw]

Very helpful, thanks!