Is it bad for SEO to use a sub-domain for your blog?

WebStore
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Driving content on your webstore with a blog can really boost your SEO as long as you have the time, energy and inspiration to keep it updated. However, many people ask us: should I put my blog on a sub-domain or a sub-folder? If your domain is www.mywebstore.com then a blog on a sub-domain would be blog.mywebstore.com and a sub-folder would be www.mywebstore.com/blog

If you want to host your blog on a completely separate server from NitroSell’s, then the sub-domain is the best solution. You host your blog on the platform of your choice, e.g., Wordpress, Blogger, Blogspot, etc., and give NitroSell Customer Support the IP address or CNAME and we will map it to blog.mywebstore.com (assuming we’re controlling your domain’s DNS).

Google penalises duplicate content in its attempt to wipe out spam and, in the past, putting a blog on a sub-domain did not help with SEO on your primary domain. There used to be a belief that the SEO juice would not “flow to your primary domain” if you had a blog on a subdomain and that this would hurt your search engine rankings.

Google is now smart enough to see both www.mywebstore.com and blog.mywebstore.com as tied to the same website and you get shared SEO benefits between the two in Google Search rankings.

The latest position is very well explained here in a 2 minute video by Matt Cutts, the public face of Google SEO:

1 Like
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Neal…Great article and video on which format to use, but it does not address link juice verses duplicate content. We don’t want to discontinue the use our Blogger account, but we also want the benefits of using Nitrosell’s blog feature in Web Store Manger for credibility and internal linking in our domain. If we post the same blog content on both, does Google penalize us for duplicate content, or does it recognize the ownership of both blogs as being tied together and therefore give us the points for cross linking?

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Hi Stan

My interpretation of what Matt Cutts is saying is leave your blog where it is but put it in a sub-domain - don’t duplicate it. I think Google will definitely penalise for putting it in both places.They hate duplicate content more than anything - it’s webspam and Matt Cutts leads the Webspam team

Neil