Should Your Blog be in a Sub-Directory, Sub-Domain or a Separate Web Domain

Jill Whalen answers some SEO related questions in SEL Blog. My favorite is about choosing between a sub-domain or sub-directory for your company blog:

Question: Should I put my blog in a sub-directory, a subdomain or on its own domain?

Jill: It depends on: whether you want to brand the blog as part of your main website or brand it as a separate entity, and whether you want people to be able to easily remember the URL.

The quick answer: Whether it’s in a sub-directory or subdomain doesn’t make too much difference, although if it’s in a subdomain you may have more chance of it showing up in the search results at the same time that your main domain also shows up, than if it’s in a sub-directory. On the other hand, the average person doesn’t think to type in subdomains if they’re trying to go directly to your site and are more likely to remember something like yourdomain.com/blog than blog.yourdomain.com. For SEO purposes, none of these things really matter, so it’s more of a business/branding decision.

fletchgqc adds: It does have some SEO importance since a subdomain is a separate domain? If you have a lot of links coming into your blog posts, wouldn’t that give authority to your domain as a whole and therefore vouch for having your blog as a sub-folder? Alternatively if you have heaps of outgoing links from your blog and not much coming in it might be better to have it as a subdomain. That was running through my head recently but I don’t really know the answers so please feel free to enlighten me.

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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