Subfolder or Subdomain for your Corporate Blog?

If you’re in the lucky enough position to initiate, design, and|or develop your company’s blog, you’ll eventually be faced with a pressing question:

Should your corporate blog be set up under a subfolder or subdomain?

We at Qmania we were faced with the decision to establish the subdomain blog.qmania.com or create the subfolder qmania.com/blog. We chose to go with blog.qmania.com. Many of our peers and our web 2.0 leaders made the same decision: blog.boorah.com, blog.kelseygroup.com, http://blog.pandora.com, blog.plaxo.com. Yelp even created separate subdomains for their community blogs and their internal blogs: communityblog.yelp.com and officialblog.yelp.com.

So why all the separation? Can’t we all just get along under one domain?

The reason for the subdomains? Well, I’m not entirely sure about the reasoning at Boorah, Kelsey Group, Pandora, Plaxo, and Yelp though I’m sure their decision making process went along the same lines as ours. At Qmania, we recognized the opportunity to create something more measurable with the subdomain. Since the services we provide at Qmania are fundamentally different than the topics we’d cover on the blog; and since the architecture of the blog is fundamentally different than the architecture of our primary service; the only way to properly test and measure SEO performance of either entity was to separate them at birth. Independent results in SEO performance arise with the separation of content across multiple subdomains, although aesthetically the look and feel remains the same between the entities.

Smart readers will ask whether or not the same effect would happen with a perfectly siloed subfolder. Wouldn’t content under the subfolder /blog pump and concentrate SEO juice like the subdomain? I’m here to tell you the answer is yes… and no. Yes, a subfolder can optimize content to the same level of performance as a subdomain (with perfect siloing). No, the subfolder would not pump SEO juice like the subdomain because the subfolder’s performance in driving organic traffic is dependent upon the domain’s performance in driving organic traffic. And since sometimes there are other pertinent reasons for not optimizing an entire domain, it’s a bad idea to make the performance of something meant to be optimized dependent on something which may or may not be.

The benefit of choosing a subdomain over a subfolder is independent, measurable performance. The benefit of choosing a subfolder over a subdomain is improving the overall authority of the domain. Choose a subdomain first. Get it fully optimized. Then decide over moving to a subfolder or keeping your subdomain on the grind.

The benefit of setting up a subdomain is independent, measurable optimization of both the content on that subdomain and the content on the domain itself, since the content that would be siloed in the subfolder would effect the optimization of the content outside the folder. If its a must to move to a subfolder from a subdomain (for branding purposes, or redefinition of your domain [to avoid a slap]), you can always 301 redirect all the pages on your subdomain blog to fresh pages on your subfolder blog. I’d recommend doing this only after you’re sure your domain is fully optimized, your blog architecture is fully optimized, and you understand how to silo subfolders to retain SEO juice. A 301 redirect will cause a short dip in organic traffic for a few weeks, but afterward all your rankings built from your subdomain will point to your subfolder — which ultimately improves the authority of your whole domain.

In other words, always start with a subdomain for loosely related content (like a corporate blog). Allow it to rank organically. After its optimized and brings in tons of traffic, you can either change it to a subfolder (if certain requirements are met) or keep it growing on a subdomain. As an important note, compete displays all traffic to domains and subdomains as an aggregate, so to the outside world, you’ll see no loss in traffic to your domain if setting up a subdomain for your corporate blog.

Webmasters of the world, what do you think? Have you ever had to decide between a subfolder and subdomain? How did you choose?

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