blog.app.com vs. app.com/blog? Which approach is better?
I'm planning to create a blog for a start-up I'm working on.
How would you guys evaluate the pros vs. cons of each approach?
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I'm pretty sure you get zero SEO value from a subdomain (blog.app.com). Perhaps Google has updated their guidelines for that since last time I checked, but I didn't want to risk it when I launched my blog.
If you think about logically it makes sense that that would be the case given that subdomains are often used as a way to give people free hosting of a site, so why on earth SHOULD they benefit from the SEO of the domain? They shouldnt as they are effectively separate entities. They arent always ACTUALLY seperate entities but because the aforementioned situation exists you have to treat all of them that way.
I found some material here on Google's perspective on the subject.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-treat-subdomains-vs-subdirectories-22485.html
Since the purpose of a blog is SEO (usually) subfolders come before subdomains.
Ahrefs and MOZ are clear examples of the above. Years ago both used to host their blogs on subdomains, and eventually moved to subfolders.
Of course, the purpose is clear - better SEO.
This topic is a controversial topic debated ad nauseam around the internet. I did several hours of research and my conclusion was, "if I want the best SEO chance, and I can handle the technical implementation of doing a subfolder, I should do the subfolder."
I'm doing a reverse proxy with Rails on Heroku with Hugo. It works great! I can deploy the blog in 5 seconds and the performance is perfect.
In my case i prefer always subdomain to host the blog cms (blog.app.com) so you can move it to another infrastructure without risks. Note that is not very good idea in security terms to "mix" your production system with third-party CMS like Wordpress.
But, in terms of SEO and link building, it is more convenient to use subfolders ( app.com/blog).
Just wanted to learn myself.
Google says they try to figure it out automatically, and I really want to put my blog on a subdomain.
When I worked at iwantmyname, I was responsible for moving the blog to a subdomain (for technical reasons/advantages) and then later back to a subdirectory. We documented our learnings here: https://iwantmyname.com/blog/seo-penalties-of-moving-our-blog-to-a-subdomain
Also a very recent, relevant tweet from Rand @ Moz: https://twitter.com/randfish/status/955933680416931840
tl;dr I'd recommend a subdirectory
Subdomain or subfolder, which is better for SEO?
Google says :
So, it seems that your rank suffered not because you moved to a subdomain, but because you changed the structure. It might have been temporary. Did you see that your rank returned when you moved back to a subdirectory?
I'm not saying it's a definitive answer, but I can see that maturity is an important factor in anything trust-related.
For SEO: clearly Subdirectory instead of Subdomain.
is your back-end in Java, by any chance?
CONTENT - I'd love and share a great blog post on a .wordpress.com website
Technically you should not have any problem with both domain, or subfolder (you can use virtual folders). From the SEO point of view the subfolder is much better because the search engine will consider your blog and your site as different urls in a case of subdomain.
Is there any source or word from Google confirming this??? What I've found states otherwise.
Show me where you saw otherwise.
check the other comments on the forum! I'll repost here in case you can't find it. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-treat-subdomains-vs-subdirectories-22485.html
Oh yeah, I saw this article. But the comments are much more interesting. You see there is still not agreement on this issue. I just wouldn't risk :)
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That's a really good answer. Thank you for the links. I will certainly take a look.
Just had to make this decision and that Moz link is what convinced me to do /blog.
The way I like to look at it is: if your goal in writing blog posts is to gain organic traffic, go the /blog route. If you're writing blog posts to inform/engage your existing customer base, subdomains offer a little more freedom.