Should I host my blog at a subdomain or a subfolder?
Where should you locate your blog,
- example.com/blog; or
- blog.example.com?
This question is being asked more and more, especially since Google changed the way it viewed sub-domains. If the blog’s subject matter is the same as that of the main site, it’s actually preferable to use a sub-folder in my opinion.
However, if the blog is essentially separate from the main site and so has a different flavour of content, a sub-domain is good. This is because your blog will still count in some way towards your main site, but will not detract from it when Google indexes the site as a whole.
Small Businesses Normally Use a Subfolder for a Blog
But let’s face it, for most small businesses, a blog is most commonly used as an extension of the main site and hence the subfolder approach seems more sensible. The content of both sites can remain on topic. This way the blog as an addition to the main site, (or indeed as the main site) provides a mechanism for boosting your search engine presence.
But What If You Can’t?
There are times though, when you might want to add a blog as a subfolder to your main site, but not be able to do so due to some technical restrictions.
For example, a friend of mine has an e-commerce shop and takes payment for items sold on his own site (he doesn’t use a payment gateway), taking responsibility for PCI compliance and security himself on his own server.
Recently, he decided to boost his rankings by adding a business blog in a sub-folder off the main e-commerce site. Great idea, and will definitely gain him more targeted traffic. But because WordPress isn’t PCI compliant – he was informed by his technical guys that he could not host WordPress on the same server as his main site. And remember this is what he wanted to do – he wanted his blog placed at the /blog folder, down from his shop domain.
How The Power Blog Service Can Help
At the Power Blog Service we host blogs for clients on completely different servers from their main sites, yet we are able to make it look as if they’re hosted in the same place to search engines. You can check out how this is done by reading our article on reverse proxy setup making your blog appear on the same domain as your main site, when it isn’t.