Does a "blog" sub-domain help the pagerank of your main site?

Asked 6/3, 2009 at 15:30 Answered 8/7, 2016 at 15:47

I have my main application site https://drchrono.com, and I have a blog sub-domain under http://blog.drchrono.com. I was told by some bloggers that the blog sub-domain of your site helps the pagerank of your main site. Does traffic to your blog sub-domain help the Google Pagerank of your site and count as traffic to your main site?

Municipal answered 6/3, 2009 at 15:30 Comment(12)

Is this a programming question? – Gotthelf 6/3, 2009 at 15:33

Nope, not IMO. Voting to close. – Corpora 6/3, 2009 at 15:36

A bit of a blurry line, but programmers are often concerned with SEO as well, so I don't see any problem with it. – Beat 6/3, 2009 at 15:36

Closed.. oh well. I wonder why all the project management questions on here don't get closed when they have nothing to do with programming? – Beat 6/3, 2009 at 15:40

@Eric P: Point them out. If we agree, they will be closed. Cannot be everywhere all the time... – Scruggs 6/3, 2009 at 15:42

They shouldn't close this question! SEO is important for every web dev. And Eric P has point - why then project management question (or all other non-programming) are not closed? – Pollitt 6/3, 2009 at 15:47

I think it was bad for the community to close this question. The people going around closing questions are kind of drunk on power. This is relevant to any web developer on this site which is a large part of the community. I'm sure C++ developers don't have blogs or websites, so don't read this! – Municipal 6/3, 2009 at 15:49

Also, there are tons of "design" questions on this site, like where to put a button and how a login process should work. Also Algorithm and technology questions which are not strictly programming. – Municipal 6/3, 2009 at 15:51

Last Comment: If questions about the Pagerank algorithm aren't right for this site, then why are there "SEO" and "Pagerank" tags? – Municipal 6/3, 2009 at 15:55

@MikeN, click those tags and find out. – Glyptic 9/3, 2009 at 14:22

Hey Mike, did posting a link to your blog here increase your pagerank? :D – Hulky 12/3, 2009 at 13:32

@Rahul: Well, why should example.com and blog.example.com get all the pagerank boosts from questions? – Municipal 12/3, 2009 at 13:50

I don't think Google gives any special treatment to sub domains named "blog". If they did, that would be a wide open door for abuse, and they're smart enough to realize that.

At one time, I think there were advantages to putting your blog on a separate subdomain though. Links from your blog to your main site could help with your main site's page rank if your blog has a decent page rank.

However, it seems like that has changed. Here's an interesting post about setting up blog subdomains vs. folders. It seems like they are actually treated the same by Google now, although nobody but Google really knows for sure how they treat them.

With regard to traffic, your Google ranking is only incidentally related to the amount of traffic your site gets. Google rankings are based primarily on content and number & quality of incoming links, not on how much traffic you get. Which makes sense since Google really has no way of knowing how much traffic you get to your site other than perhaps the traffic they send there via Google searches.

Beat answered 6/3, 2009 at 15:34 Comment(4)

I agree. Sounds like a old search engineer's tale to me. – Florafloral 6/3, 2009 at 15:35

Subdomain is something between TLD and subfolder, in terms of SEO. Until end of 2007, subdomain was entirely separated content, like TLD, but that's not any longer the case. For PR, only number of incoming links counts. But PR!=number of organic visitors from google! – Pollitt 6/3, 2009 at 15:43

My question wasn't if there was something special about the ".blog" sub-domain, it was in general if traffic to all of your sub-domains added up to boost the "traffic score" or rank of your overall site. Although, maybe there is something special about .blog. – Municipal 12/3, 2009 at 13:51

It's a bit more complicated than that, but at the risk of over-simplifying it, yes, it appears that subdomains would be seen by google as an extension of your overall site and not as a separate site. – Beat 12/3, 2009 at 17:15

Not directly, but...

I do not know if "blog" specifically helps the pagerank of your site in some special way - google guards its pagerank secrets fairly well. If you really wanted to find out, you would create two sites roughly the same content but one with blog in the domain name and one without. Index them and see if the pagerank settings are different. My gut instinct is - no.

It is known that google indexes the name of the site and it improves your chances of getting listed on the search results if the site name corresponds to the search terms. So, it would be reasonable to assume that (unless google specifically removed indexing of the word blog) that when someone searched for a main search term and "blog" the chances of your site showing up would be slightly higher.

For example, it should help searches for: drchrono blog.

By the way, google changes its algorithms all the time, so this is just speculation.

Stonechat answered 10/3, 2009 at 20:39 Comment(0)

according to an article on hubspot.com

The search engines are treating subdomains more and more as just portions of the main website, so the SEO value for your blog is going to add to your main website domain. If you want your blog to be seen as part of your company, you should it this way (or the next way).

however they go on to say there isn't a big difference between blog.domain.com and domain.com/blog

you can read the full article here: hubspot article on blog domains

Entablement answered 12/3, 2009 at 18:43 Comment(0)

One thing using a sub-domain will help is your sites Alexa rank.

Alexa give rank to all pages using your main domain. If you use the Alexa Toolbar you I see all subdomains have the same rank as your main page. So hit's to your sub's will count toward your sites Alexa.

Sacramentarian answered 12/11, 2010 at 12:5 Comment(0)

I don't think the subdomain will anything to the pagerank, but however, it might make content easier to find than in a folder.

Let's say you search for something on google, from your page, I could search for

domain:blog.drchrono.com someTopic or articleImLookingFor

Since it is a subdomain, I would guess it counts as traffic to the main site.

Personally, if I was to setup a blog, I would go for the subdomain and would probably set up a redirect from

http://drchrono.com/blog to http://blog.drchrono.com

Exemplification answered 13/3, 2009 at 17:24 Comment(0)

blog.domain.tld and www.domain.tld are not treated as unrelated sites, assuming they're handled by the same final ns authority. It has never been clear to me if pages are ranked entirely independently or if a reputation for a domain and hence it's subdomains figures into it beyond just being linked to.

But if I read your question differently, I'd say there's no difference in doing either:

I've tried setting up pages at both photos.domain.tld/stuffAboutPhotos and www.domain.tld/photos/stuffAboutPhotos for a month at a time. I found no noticeable difference between the search engine referral rates.

But then it's actually hard to do this independently of other factors.

Therefore I conclude that despite the human logic indicating that the domain is more important, there is no advantage to putting a keyword in the domain as opposed to the rest of the url, except to be sure it's clearly delimited (use slash, dash, or underscore in the rest of the url).

If Google has a shortlist of keywords that do rank better in a domain name than in the rest of the url, they're definitely not sharing it with anyone not wearing a Google campus dampened exploding collar.

Handtomouth answered 15/3, 2009 at 9:26 Comment(0)

Google treat a subdomain as a domain. If this wasn't true, then all those blogspot blogs would have had a higher SERPS.

Whitener answered 7/5, 2009 at 14:41 Comment(1)

Yes, but the question is do all blogs add to blogspot's rank? – Plummy 11/4, 2014 at 23:52

With subdomains it is a bit easier as Google "knows" it is a "separate" site. With sub-directories it is tricky. Though, with sub-domains it is the same. Google would rank these ones anything between PR0 and PR3 in the past year, currently: PR1: of-cour.se

Cheers!

Rog answered 18/10, 2009 at 9:27 Comment(0)

Not really. Blogs do do some nice things to the SEO for your sites, but if they're inside the site it doesn't work the same.

A better option is have a completely separate domain that contains the blog (something like drchronoblog.com), and have lots of links from the blog site to the main site.

That way search engines see the links but do not make the connection between the blog and the main site, and thus it makes your page rank better.

Mays answered 10/3, 2009 at 18:49 Comment(0)

It wont give your site higher priority just because you have a blog. subdomain. But im sure more people will find your site if they search for blogs..´ And therefore more traffic´, more traffic, more visits though the search engines and so on..

So id say yes :)

Deactivate answered 12/3, 2009 at 9:40 Comment(0)

Since PageRank is dealing with the rank on search engine. Let's make a little test:

https://www.google.com/search?q=blog

you may see that

example.com/blog

rank higher than

blog.example.com

This almost in the same figure for whatever domains.

However when it were possible, I will fight more to get blog.wordpress.com as it treated on any search engine as my own profile than a folder named wordpress.com/blog that for sure still belong to wordpress.com.

Grateful answered 8/7, 2016 at 15:47 Comment(0)

-2

The only way a blog can help you as far as SEO depends on the content in your blog. Just having a blog isn't enough.

Doctorate answered 13/3, 2009 at 16:1 Comment(0)

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