Don't Have Your Blog on Your Main Domain? Big Mistake!

• We just took over a client who set-up their blog on a separate domain, independent of their main site. The client is adamant that this helps them for cross-linking purposes but we aren't convinced. Wouldn't it be better to bring that blog back onto the main site as a subfolder or subdomain? What are the main arguments for and against this?

Answer: You are right to be concerned. Your client has implemented a TERRIBLE SEO strategy that we definitely don't recommend. Think about the purpose of a blog:

• to quickly and easily publish content that adds to the root domain
  
• to generate incoming links to both the blog and to the root domain
  
• to generate social media signals (which push up the main domain and add ranking authority in Google)
  
• to generate RSS subscribers and repeat traffic (which again, benefits the whole site)
  
• to best take advantage of Google's new Freshness Update which took place late last year
  

By publishing their blog on a separate domain your client has eliminated ALL the above possible benefits. Further, by setting up two unique sites the client has doubled your workload, since now you have to actively build links into not one site, but two, to generate PageRank and future authority.

We checked your supplied client blog site and main domain URLs. Your client's main site is a weak PageRank 3. The blog is a PageRank 0. So cross-linking from a PageRank 0 blog isn't going to provide much pop to the main domain, even if you were to start actively promoting the blog through concentrated link building.

In contrast, if you MOVED all that content on the PR 0 blog BACK onto the client's main domain that would provide some clear, actionable benefits, including:

• more content pages for Google to rank competitively
  
• consolidation of any incoming links from both sites into one main site (by means of 301 redirects)
  
• INCREASED c...