Where is the best place to put your blog? Where should you host it? Put the blog in a subdomain or directory? Should I integrate the blog? What about off-site options like Medium and LinkedIn?
It’s a big decision. Like a lot of decisions in digital marketing, it has implications big and small. When you decide where to blog, you’re making a decision that potentially affects each of the following:
There are at least five answers to the “where to blog” question. We’ll explore the pros and cons of each in this post. Let’s start by summarizing options and impacts in a chart…
The first two options are the classic ways to integrate a blog into a website directly. These are the nicer, but more expensive approaches.
The last three are off-site options, hosted outside of your website. They are fast and cheap, but have specific disadvantages.
Let’s break them down.
This is what you’re reading now. The blog is fully integrated into the website. It’s in its own subfolder (also known as a directory) and it’s managed through the same content management system as the rest of the website. This happens to be a WordPress website.
This kind of blog integration requires careful planning and design. It’s part web design and part content strategy. It’s true integration so blog content lives at the root domain.
Here’s a breakdown of the benefits and costs.
Pros:
Cons:
It’s mostly a technical decision. Your visitors may never notice the subdirectory vs. subfolder difference. Visually, blog integration can be seamless with a subdomain.
The big advantage of subdomains is that they’re fast, easy and inexpensive to set up. You can add a blog hosted on a third-party system (Hubspot, Uberflip, etc.) with little to no programming. It has no impact on your main website. For hosting, It’s over there and you’re over here. Easy peasy.
This is why so many Hubspot customers have WordPress websites but blogs hosted by Hubspot at blog.website.com. It’s cheap to set up. There’s really no other reason to do it.
Pros:
Cons:
Let’s dive deeper into each of these implications. First the Analytics fix, then the SEO debate.
It’s a bad idea to use a separate Analytics property or view to track blog traffic. It makes all of your Analytics less accurate.
If it is separate, you’re going to have some accuracy issues. Visitors who go from a sales page to the blog look like they exited the website. That same visitor is now counted twice. If they come back, they’re counted again.
Without proper setup, a visitor moving from your website to your blog and back again is tracked as two visitors and three visits.
In just two clicks, both visitors and visits (users and sessions) have been inflated. Your website is referring traffic to itself. Ouch.
The fix isn’t simple, but it doesn’t take long. You’ll need to create a new view and a fancy filter. Once done, Analytics will show the full URL in all the reports (including blog.website.com).
This video breaks down the step-by-step process for tracking blogs on subdomains in Google Analytics:
Now onto the SEO debate…
Is it “bad for SEO” to have your content on a subdomain? Does Google index at content on subdomains differently? Do links to subdomains pass full value to the main domain?
Evidence:
Google’s own statements. John Mueller answered the question in a now famous video from 2017.
Evidence:
The blog isn’t actually on your website. It’s on a free, hosted, third-party blogging site like wordpress.com or blogspot.com.
Pros:
Cons:
If you need to set up a blog before you go to lunch, this is a good way to go.
This is actually a popular option. Some companies are forgoing hosted blogs and just sending their visitors over the Medium. It might sound crazy at first, but weigh the considerations…
Pros:
Cons:
Yes. And it could still be at yourwebsite.com/blog as if it was part of your CMS
If you love the medium editor and want to use it to manage your blog, but want everything on your domain, you can embed a Medium blog into your website. It requires some programming (documentation here) but once complete, it will be a seamless experience for visitors with no SEO disadvantages.
Pros: The Medium editor is pretty sweet!
Cons: But now you’ve got two content management systems, one for your webpages and another (Medium) for your blog content.
Just like Medium, you can blog directly into the LinkedIn platform. It’s not a popular option for businesses for several reasons, but it is an option.
Pros
Cons:
This brings us to a final idea for the location of your blog content.
‘Where to blog?’ isn’t an either/or question. You can blog everywhere. And one blog can appear in several places. It’s called syndication.
After a post has run its course on your website, shares fall off and traffic flattens out. How else to make the message visible? Post it again on LinkedIn. Literally just copy and paste the article into the editor. It’s very easy and can be delegated to a virtual assistant.
If you want to get more aggressive, replace the last part of the article with a call to action to read the full version on your website. And to measure the impact, add campaign tracking code so you can see all of this traffic separate in your Analytics.
Here are the results from the 15 articles syndicated into LinkedIn, posted to my account over the last 6 months.
Probably, the actual website traffic from these posts was much higher, because each article contained internal links which didn’t have campaign tracking code.
But, Andy, isn’t there a penalty for duplicate content? No.
I’d love input from you, dear reader, on your experience with blog integration, hosting and syndication!
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Fantastic article. I love that you did exactly what you recommended! I have been trying to figure this out for myself before establishing a firm presence but you are right and this makes sense. A bastardized way of what I do personally on social media… post it on various personal social media platforms, customizing a little depending on the platform (if I want to share the same thing on multiple platforms because I know different people on each one). Thanks for this article!
Thanks for the great tips! I would add that blog hosting platforms and mediums are both bad for building authority, as well as everything you mentioned.
When setting up the filter for domain vs. subdomain tracking, can I simply add the filter to my existing view instead of creating a new view? I already know that the current view is tracking both domain and sub domain activity.
Thanks for this, it’s a topic I’ve been grappling with. I’m interested in using existing blogs on LinkedIn and/or Medium — you write “Post it again on LinkedIn. Literally just copy and paste the article into the editor.” Where specifically are you recommending we do that? Simply as a new post on our company page? Or post as an individual member of LinkedIn and publish as an article? And if the latter, any special tips? Thanks.
The issue I wish to clarify has to do with where the syndicated content is published. Since as you point out companies do not write articles, that would seem to imply it would need to be published by an employee (presumably the one wrote the blog, yes?). If you have other suggestions I’ve missed I’d appreciate hearing them. Thanks.
If you are using WordPress, your blog is on your (parent) domain – that’s not mentioned – are there problems with that Andy?
Hi Andy,
Another great post. I’m really glad I receive your newsletter. What are your thoughts on cross-posting on Medium and your own website? In my head I’m weighing a full integrated communications strategy versus SEO best practices. The discovery and sharing nature of Medium isn’t insignificant to me, particularly because well-written posts or op-eds could get selected by editors and elevated to featured content. On the other hand, I don’t love the idea of not “owning” my content on my own site and if I’m trying to blog as a way to drive inbound traffic I’m probably not going to see too much of that from Medium.
Thank you!
-Chris
Andy, once again a helpful and very thorough guide. Thank you so much for writing and sharing this. I’d like your thoughts on what if we posted a blog post to our own web site and shared the same post on Medium or LinkedIn? Do the Google gods frown upon that?
There’s probably no difference in terms of SEO, analytics reporting and search, but was hoping you were going to address the two most popular domain options for a blog:
1) yourwebsite.com/blog/
vs
2) yourwebsite.com/
Scanning popular sites, there seems to be a mix, but a leaning toward #2, i.e. sans the “blog” folder in the nomenclature. Yes you can change between the two, and insert a site redirect. But probably best to pick and stick with the decision.
You’re a man of science, so what do the facts and stats tell us about the two options?
Very helpful and understandable article. Gratitude for a well crafted Quick read
Okay… what if… you have a directory blog and you’re looking for authoritative links back to the blog? So… you write a fresh blog post on Medium or another blogging platform (thinking of builtinchicago.org) and add a link back to one of your directory blog posts?
Do you think Google would consider that an authoritative link?
–Tony Gnau
Great question, Tony! Short answer: no.
Although the authority of Medium’s domain is huge, the authority of the specific page on Medium (the post that links back to your site) is super low. That’s because it’s one of a gazillion pages on Medium so it shares only a tiny amount of Medium’s Domain Authority. This is the same reason links from social media aren’t powerful. Although FaceWorld has a huge Domain Authority, the social post with the link back to your site is one of trillions on that platform. So it passes little to no value.
It’s a good thing that it works this way. If links from Medium were valuable, SEO spammers would flood the platform with low-value content and piles of links. That’d be terrible…
There is an inverse relationship between easy and valuable. Any link that’s easy to make (press releases, blog comments, social posts, Reddit links, etc.) are probably not worth much.
Same with everything in life, right? Things that are worthwhile are rarely easy!
No doubt! I assume that goes for small platforms like builtinchicago.org as well?