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What are the SEO benefits of having a blog and where you host it?
I am wondering about the SEO benefits of having your blog hosted where you have your domain hosted vs. having it hosted elsewhere but connected to your website (on its own domain or on a wordpress domain)? Doesn't hosting it elsewhere make you lose out on some of the SEO benefits a blog brings you? From a SEO point of view and domain authority building point of view, is it better to use www.blog.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/blog if you decide to link it to your domain directly?
Best Answer
Written on this exact topic many times over at our SEO blog -- here's a recent post -- but only on the topic that such usage of a blog DOES generate rankings --
http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php/2010/12/blogging-for-google-rankings-yes-p...
As to the 'where' aspect, we both host for clients on our own servers and have a few that use hosted blogs...and as we can "get" to the WP or Blogger code directly, it matters not a whit as to the 'where' it's hosted....
Sub-domain or not....but we like domainname.com/blog better just from a style/functionality viewpoint...
:-)
Jim
I have a profile on HubPages;
http://hubpages.com/hub/Doing-Business-in-Charlotte-NC
and
http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Business.Development.by.Giles.704-315-...
and when I blog from those platforms my content comes up higher in the search results for matching words.
I also recommend LinkedIn;
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/johnny-giles/1b/914/73b
When you connect your Twitter account you get even more exposure. Also it is all free and that is the best part!
Hope this helps!
Johnny
Thank you all for your answers! (And apologies for the lateness in my reply! :) ) Special thanks to Brent and Jim for their answers that tipped the scale in my quest for an SEO solution for my blog problem. I will start looking at hosting the blog on my own domain immediately.
Kind regards,
Linda
If you host on the wordpress or blogger site your audience will be much larger than if you use a self hosted solution.
As Google (and other search engines) pay a lot of attention to these large portals your indexed content will tend to be fresher as they spider it more frequently.
For SEO purposes the 3rd party hosted blogs build PageRank and relevant silo density.
best
Reg
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Related Activity
Host the blog on your domain (not the WordPress.com domain or blogger.com or the like), either set it up as a folder, or a sub-domain. Deciding on this will depend on your strategy for rankings. A sub-domain can sometimes be seen as a different site by the search engines, so to get multiple pages ranking it may make sense to use a sub-domain strategy if the primary domain is already ranking very well, to try and dominate the search results. However if your primary domain doesn't have much authority yet, then use the blog to build site authority and host it as a directory.
Hosting directly off WordPress or another blog hosting platform will give you minimal SEO benefit. You'll get some links back from another domain, but it won't help your own domain build any SEO authority. Lastly blogging will likely help you out the most in the long tail. The more unique content you have that is indexed and spidered, the more likely you are to see terms you never expected driving traffic to your site.
You can also use the blog to sculpt terms you want to rank on that are part of the short head, by linking text in your blogs back to key pages on your parent site, but I think you will be surprised by words and terms people use to find your site once you have a blog up and running.
The best answer is:
Blog often
Blog on topics related to your site
Host your blog on your own domain.
You can read more on sub-domains vs. sub-folders at: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-or-subfolders-which-are-better-...