Subdomains vs. Subdirectory for a Blog: Better, Worse, Indifferent?

Question.  I hope that you are doing well! I took your BAVC SEO class in late November, and am reaching out with a question that I hope you can provide a little insight on. We’re currently looking into launching a blog, and we’re considering our options for both hosting and domain options. Our current domain for the website is ~.org We have a few different sites, such as shop.~.org and collections.~.org that are linked to our main site and, if I understand correctly, the link authority for these sub-domains do feed into the authority for the main site. For SEO purposes, would you recommend launching the blog on its own sub-domain, such as blog.~.org, or as a part of the directory for the main site, such as ~.org/blog? Or, is there not much difference?

Answer. 

This is the proverbial subdirectory versus subdomain problem in search engine optimization. There are two camps in this dispute. One camp, to which I subscribe, says that subdirectories are far superior. So in this example it would be better to host your blog on your own domain and your blog address would be something like your company.com/blog. The reason that this is superior, in my opinion, is that to Google and to being all of the subdirectories underneath a domain contribute to the domain authority.

It is very clear that when a new blog post is published or a new page to a website, that the page itself has no page authority. Therefore, it is logical that Google looks to the domain itself for such authority. What many people do not understand is that www.company.com and blog.company.com are, to Google, two very separate domains! Therefore, your multiple subdomains actually are not really helping each other!

So in my mind, you should definitely go with option number two, and have your blog live underneath your primary domain.

I should point out however that there are some people who believe that this is not a big deal. They believe that subdomains actually do transfer page rank to the domain itself. I do not believe this to be the case, however.

For example, if you look at a directory of web blogs such as WordPress.com or Blogger.com, you can see that there are literally thousands of blogs living on one domain. It would be ridiculous for Google to assume that the domain authority would transfer across all of these subdomains. This is one indication of why I do not subscribe to the second camp.

Little Upside to Subdomains

Another one is that there is little upside to using subdomains and there is a lot of downside potential. So, while it may be true, that a subdomain isn’t as bad as one might think, there is little upside to using one. It does not help your website. So why do something with little upside, but potential downside?

So, in some, if you ask my humble opinion, there is no contest. You will be greatly rewarded by putting your blog on your domain.

Also, you should be reminded, that a blog is an immensely powerful apparatus for both the search engine optimization and social media marketing. Once you start your blog, you will find, that it will improve all aspects of your Internet marketing. I am a huge fan of blogging!

Good luck!