Keep the blog separate or incorporate into main domain?

[SCFederal]

So my organization currently has both a main site and on a separate domain and separate host a wordpress blog.  (our own domain not a wordpress.com)

the content posted on this blog is local, community driven, and related to our business but it is not used in anyway as a "sales" tool.  It's more for interaction purposes with members and employees.

This blog has a lot of content and is updated with new posts very often. (generate traffic from a pretty wide variety of searches some related some not)  My plan has been to 301 the old domain and move the wordpress blog over to our root domain in a subdirectory such as oursite.com/blog.

Does anyone have tips for moving a blog over like this?  I'm concerned about any link juice it has dropping off and since it does provide some links to our root site currently (since it's basically a separate site).  Basically i'm wondering if it'll be worth the effort or if i should just keep it separate and focus on other content gen strategies.

[SCFederal]

great input and much appreciated.

Ideally i would like to have the blog moved over, but there is a lot of links/content to deal with.  I'm working on developing several content gen strategies, and wanted to make the blog a part of that.  Currently it's always been more a part of the social media efforts, but work has been done to better connect it to the main site and make sure it's branded to be one in the same.

Where i'm a little unclear is the tech efforts of doing this.  I would assume as thomas mentioned it's a matter of creating the subfolder to house the wordpress install/content and setting up a 301 on the old domain, but the need to do each post individually is where my concern is.

[RobMay]

Absolutely! This is probably a priority project in my eyes if you are serious about building this up and going in the right direction now.

Moving the BLOG to your domain.com will not only improve the relation to your site and content, but brand it as well. Having the BLOG on another  domain (as it is now) might help you from a link building perspective (more than likely not helping very much) due to the fact Google would know you own that domain, and perhaps place  less emphasis on  the inbound links to the main site.

First - setup your site/domain to host the BLOG as you mentioned. www.domain.com/blog.  There are a  few reasons for this.

1. It will allow you to reap the rewards of the  content you build (supporting your site/company/mission) and support the main domain,  and it's

2. The content you build, share and move into the social sphere and space will allow for inbound links to be shared across the entire site/domain. (don't build it into a sub-domain like blog.domain.com as this  is considered to be a completely separate domain and  won't pass any link value and  juice across the domain).  sub-domains are considered to be domains by themselves in the eyes of a search engine like Google.

3. The content you build (and load daily to the BLOG) will keep search spiders coming back for more

4. Keeping the BOG content on the main domain, allows you to share the content of the BLOG to your web visitors who might be searching via BRAND or specific, helping associate the brand with the content marketing resource you are building. This in itself is a gold-mine, as it will also act as another source for long-tail traffic opportunity, but you'll have to do  your due diligence on this from  a research perspective to capitalize on the traffic.

5. Content marketing is going to be BIG  (as it's already on the rise and exploding now). This will all fall under your efforts for the BLOG and  should be focused on.  The value here is  that  over time,  Google will begin to apply TRUST and AUTHORITY factors to the content you write  and submit - helping to support your brand as a  quality resource of shared information for people.

Make sure to use rel=canonical from  the old location URL's and point those over to the new URL's on  the domain.com/blog listing. Also make sure  to use rel=author for each of the articles on the new blog from a META position.

NOTE:  Handling a migration such as this is very complex (especially if the BLOG is extremely large with thousands, or 10's of thousands of posts and articles). Even a few hundred can be TRICKY!

Not only do you have to setup the files (BLOG) on the new domain, but you will have to write and execute 301's for every single article on the old location/domain and point that over to the new one.  Some CMS's like Drupal can assist with this if your programmers can handle writing the scripts. This is a  very technical undertaking, so make sure to do your research.  If it's a small resource, you can still follow the same protocols, but it will take much less time to complete.

I recently handled and oversaw a technical project like this months back that took quite a long time to do, troubleshoot as it had over 30K articles and 25K in image files over the past 6 years! It was a huge undertaking that  went extremely well, but you have to be patient.

Hope this  helps some!  There's probably a little more I didn't mention as I'm late for a  meeting with a client!, so if  you have questions -  let me know!

Rob

[Thos003]

I've got a separate blog site. There are benefits to both scenarios. The reason I have chosen to keep them separate is so that I can post content from other bloggers and contributors and not worry about the content being officially endorsed by Bulwark.

If you do move it over to your main site, you can easily export the wordpress site and all it's content to a sub-folder and then do a 301 redirect rule from your old blog. It is probably ideal to have them all on one site so long as the company wants to take claim for all the content written there.

[mytouchoftech]

I would say it's worth the effort to give your main site a boost.  IMO the more content you can get on your own site that's relevant, the more Google has to base it's evaluation off you.  If your blog has alot of fresh content, that'll keep Google coming back for more!