Where Should Our Blog Live? A Subdomain, a Hosted Solution or a Directory?
Posted on December 25th, 2008 in blogging | 3 Comments »
In deciding to pen the day to day tasks and challenges that we’re encountering within A Lending Hand, we had to also decide how and where we would publish our blog.
Blogging Options:
Subdomain such as blog.alendinghand.com
Subdirectory such as alendinghand.com/blog/
External Hosting such as alendinghand.wordpress.com
What are the pros and cons of using a subdomain?
PROS:
- blog.alendinghand.com is an intuitive location for a blog about alendinghand.com.
- software installed on our subdomain will not interfere with any software on our domain.
- Google will count links from our subdomain to our domain as external links.
- we keep alendinghand.com in our domain name (instead of going with an externally hosted solution like wordpress.com).
CONS:
- Google sees the subdomain as an entirely different website.
- links to and page rank merit accrued by blog.alendinghand.com will not directly benefit alendinghand.com.
Off the bat, I liked the idea of blog.alendinghand.com. The goals for this business blog are to post about our process and not so much about the content of A Lending Hand. While we won’t be building link merit for alendinghand.com, we will be increasing A Lending Hand’s presence on the web and that feels in line with our goals for this blog.
3 Responses
Thanks for your pro and con list – it’s helping me think through how to add additional pages. Or, I should say get someone else to add them as I’m not a web developer.
I’m wondering if someone could tell me the difference between a subdomain and a / addition, for example:
newpage.earvoltion.com vs
earvolution.com/newpage
Do the pros/cons above apply to both?
JD – Thanks for asking for clarification. We’ve added examples to the original post.
And indeed, the examples you’ve listed are accurate and the pros/cons in our post do apply to both.
Generally subdomains are only used when the site contents are entirely unique from that of the main domain. For example, blog.alendinghand.com is not another page on alendinghand.com, it’s a website of it’s own.
Hope this helps! We’re happy to clarify any other questions you might have.
Thanks for the tip!