ChaChing

Our blog has moved and is now live in its new home within www.chaching.ie rather than on its on domain at blog.chaching.ie. 

I had posted to the Enterprise Ireland mailling list to ask the resident SEO experts which would be better, hosting a blog on its own domain (as I had been doing – blog.chaching.ie) or as part of the main website domain (as it is now – www.chaching.ie/blog ). As you can already imagine the majority recommended that the blog be hosted within the main website itself rather than on a subdomain. The main reason for this would be that any inbound link to your blog would be a link to your website rather than being an inbound link to a site that links to your site – still with me ?

Ivan from seoconsultant.ie, was the first to recommend having it on the main website domain because of the inbound links it may generate.

Maurice, Fresh Web Consulting, echoed the above and also mentioned that a blog could generate alot of unique and regularly updated content – which is something search engines look for.

Ann, e-business.ie, mentioned the fact that having an external blog can get you some inbound links early on, which for ChaChing would be useful as its early days! She has used this with some success in the past, and thinks an external domain could be good for this. Maria, date-for-free.com, agrees with her but mentions that you should be wary of mass linking to the main website all over the blog as this could appear to be blog spam to search engines. On the topic of using external domains Mick Wright, VooDoo, recommended using third party online services such as twitter, facebook, myspace and linkedin for promotion rather than just having a blog on a separate domain.

Joe Molloy, hyper-typer.com, mentioned that managing your website and your blog via would be easier with them both in the same place and again echoed Ivan on having the blog within your main domain for inbound links. He also gave the very useful piece of information that when moving a blog the best thing to do is to use a 301 redirects from the old url to the new one for search engines.

Richard, Red Cardinal, again agreed with Ivan, Joe & Maurice

Michele, blacknight, made the good point that a sub domain can be hosted on a separate server which can be beneficial.

Lastly Tom, 2bescene, gave good reasons for both sides saying that having the blog as a subdirectory of your main website allows the blog to generate traffic to your website and also if your domain has a good PageRank it will pass on to your blog, and reiterated Ann & Maria saying that having your blog on an external domain will allow you to get some inbound links.

In the end, as you can see from the beginning of the post and also the url, I decided to move the blog into a subdirectory of the main website. By updating the blog regularly I hope it can get more inbound links to the www.chaching.ie domain and give more unique content to the domain. 

I will put a 301 redirect on the blog.chaching.ie domain to www.chaching.ie/blog, just have not gotten round to it just yet!

Thanks to everybody who gave their opinions based on their specialist knowledge it was much appreciated!