Comments on: Where to Put a New Blog: Domain, Sub-domain or Directory?

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:29:27 +0000

lol to the wedding crashers, great movie!

Nice blog too, an interesting read.

By: Alexis Hansen

Alexis Hansen — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:53:00 +0000

I am debating whether to add a brand new domain for a new company we want to add that does tv infomercial marketing. My options are a new domain with the company name Regeneca or going with a subdirectory on my domain with pagerank on http://infomercialwinners.com ?

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Alexis

By: Lucian Ioan

Lucian Ioan — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:33:04 +0000

Thank you for the great post. We shall choose the “directory” solution.

By: Adam Audette

Adam Audette — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:37:57 +0000

@Kaitlyn classic SERP ownership strategy, I like it! You’re absolutely right, a point Meg did mention in her post when talking about new domains:

Scenario 1: You have a domain that has a lot of authority and ranks well and you want to continue targeting and gain rankings for similar terms – thereby gaining more search inventory for targeted terms and essentially “own” the search results.

We should update the section on subdomains to reflect your point, though, because it’s dead on. Subdomains can work well, when classic SERP saturation is the goal (not as well as 2002, but still pretty well).

By: Kaitlyn Dhanaliwala

Kaitlyn Dhanaliwala — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:44:33 +0000

There is one big advantage of a subdomain over a subdirectory structure that I don’t see in your post. Google only allows two search results listings per domain. (Well, there has recently been talk that Google may be increasing that number to three). But in any case, Google treats subdomains much like larger domains in this respect. So if you use a subdirectory, your site will only have a maximum of two listings per results page. With a subdomain, your site will be allowed up to four listings. So if you want to keep your blog on the same main domain as your website for branding purposes AND dominate more of the search results page, a subdomain will let you accomplish that. A subdirectory just can’t.

By: Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:55:15 +0000

Meg,
Assuming the Wedding Crashers photo tie in is the image tag (don’t shoot me in the butt)? Hee, hee. Cheers, Lisa

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:21:42 +0000

Thank you for this excellent post. I come across this question all the time and most clients have no rational way to deal with it. Especially in corporate environments, working through the options and weighing the benefits of each can become 50% of the work. I’m glad to see other people are working through this in a thoughtful way too and not just rushing to the new domain because it is easy.

By: Meg Thompson

Meg Thompson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:32:40 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Cory!

By: Cory @ MorePro

Cory @ MorePro — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:07:12 +0000

I agree, there is no clear cut winner (of the 3).

We’ve certainly run into this dilemma a few times. Each setup should be evaluated for positive/negative factors before deciding where the blog should reside.

Most often, we choose to put it on the same site in a folder, but secondary domains, etc. can be beneficial if targeting a niche audience or if the blog has a unique purpose.