Where is the best location for your blog?

[Essjay]

This is one querstion I've been thinking about for a while: where is the best location for a blog on your website for SEO purposes? In this case I'm thinking the blog as part of a commerical website.

Sub domain: You could put it on a subdomain such as blog.mydomain.com which seems quite popular (blog.kissmetrics for example) but surely this is giving the blog.mydomain sub domain the SEO value and not the www.mydomain sub domain. The one value I see here is that you could host this on another server and so any links to my main website would be from a different IP address. You could also point the sub domain to a WordPress.com blog.

Internal: There are two ways the blog could be run internal to the website: 1) if the website is a WordPress.org installation you could just use one category as the blog or 2) a fresh WordPress.org installation in a sub folder such as www.mydomain.com/blog. The benefits I see with #2 is that any guest posters would only have access to the blog and not the main company website and you could make the look and feel of the blog to be more "bloggy" than the main commerical website.

External: TBH I don't think there is any benefit to running a blog completely external to the commerical website (such as a WordPress.com blog) unless the company provides online services so that if the main website goes down, the blog will still be running.

So, from the above, which is the best way to run a commerical site blog? Or have I missed some other options?

[Essjay]

OK, thanks for the info.

So going with the "mydomain/blog" setup, would there be any SEO benefit to using mod_rewrite to redirect the "/blog" to a different server?

The thinking being that any links back to the site would be coming from a different IP address.

[Catalyste]

I also would recommand putting it in /blog but you could also want to build it on another domain if you want to get a plan B if you 1st domain lower is rankings.It's a longer work to build linking and authority but when done you also get longer benefits.

[MalcolmGibb]

domain.com/blog is current best practice for hosting a blog to benefit your domain from content freshness and linking. A subdomain will be seen as a seperate site.

There are commerical reasons why you would want an external blog such as for customer service issues or a branding exercise, but if you want the benefits of the links and content a blog will generate host it on your domain root.

[bradkrussell]

Hi Sacha,

This was recently asked here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/blogs-are-best-when-hosted-on-domain-subdomain-or

I agree with Alan and Todd in that thread, you should go for www.domain.com/blog

Thanks