does blog location matter for SEO?

[Michael Paul Eau Claire]

Hi-

I have a blog located at blog dot mydomain.com. It's a wordpress blog that was free to setup thru my web host. It's been up for about a month.

I've been told by someone I trust that the blog would be better for SEO if it were located at www dot mydomain.com/blog.

my site has been up for a couple years and ranks quite well...#1 on yahoo and #5 in google. I'd like to use the blog to pull more people into the site, and vice versa.

Does my friend have a valid point? Would search engines be more friendly to the blog if it were on the same domain as the main site?


thanks for any help to a newb...

[kid disco]

Your friend is worth trusting, in my book. The search engines generally treat subdomains as completely different entities. That's not to say that some quality may transfer over, but if you are trying to raise the authority of your site, it would be best to add the blog on a subdirectory, rather than a subdomain.

[Michael Paul Eau Claire]

cool, thanks for the backup. I'll try to get that done before the blog gets popular.

[kensmith]

There are a lot of SEO's that would disagree with that advice, then again a lot of others agree. Basically you can prove that either of them work so if you already have it set up there probably is little reason to change it.

[kid disco]

Disagree with what part?

[Michael Paul Eau Claire]

There are a lot of SEO's that would disagree with that advice, then again a lot of others agree. Basically you can prove that either of them work so if you already have it set up there probably is little reason to change it.

ok, but if the main site ranks well and the blog doesn't, wouldn't the blog be made more popular by moving onto the main site?

[webmaster]

I tested the subdomain vs subfolder many times on some very high authority sites, and ALWAYS the subfolder was better than the subdomains - notice the blogs, forum, directory etc on REW all all on the domain, not sub domains,

[drewnick]

But subdomains are cooler. I personally use /blog and love it!

[Michael Paul Eau Claire]

thanks for your input, gentlemen!

[kensmith]

Disagree with what part?

"I've been told by someone I trust that the blog would be better for SEO if it were located at www dot mydomain.com/blog."

There are some SEO advantages to having your blog on a subdomain. You will need to build a few links to the blog, but in the end you can end up with more top ten spots this way. You could actually have 4 of the top 10 spots with the use of a subdomain, this can never be achieved with a subfolder.

Just depends on what you are trying to achieve. So like I said either way will work, it really does depend on your exact goals of having the blog.