Avoid This Common SEO Pitfall On Your Blog

I would say that the most common mistake I find when we audit a company’s website is that their blog is hosted on a subdomain—such as blog.juicyresults.com—or even on an entirely different domain—such as juicyresults.blogger.com.

If one of your main goals for blogging is to improve search rankings, it is absolutely critical that you have your blog on your root domain like this:
juicyresults.com/[blog here]/

The reason this pitfall even occurs is that it is easier for third party companies to make their software work with a subdomain rather than within the root domain. While this may be efficient, it is not as effective.

Many people set up a blog on a third party site (i.e. blogger, Tumblr or WordPress.com), or within a marketing application such as Hubspot or Act-On, all of which offer this subdomain option. With these services your blog is typically assigned a subdomain under their domain, and not yours.

Why This Hurts Your SEO Efforts

Let me explain why this is a negative action.

Google has metrics they apply to pages, subdomains and root domains. These metrics indicate perceived quality, trust, authority and even subject-matter context. We have learned that these metrics often do not transfer from subdomain to domain.

We are assuming that your blog posts will be some of the most shared, linked-to and cited pages of your website. This means these pages will have high quality scores or “page authority.” If these blog posts are not on your root domain, then your main website pages are getting little to no SEO return on all of your blogging investment.

The Right Way To Do It

Setting up a blog on your domain is ideal. For example, your blog might be:

• www.juicyresults.com/blog
• Or, even better (use a keyword): www.juicyresults.com/internet-marketing-tips/

But, when setting up a free blog at blogger or another tool, your web address is more likely to be: juicyresults.blogger.com (not ideal!).

This likely means that you will have to install a blogging platform such as WordPress on your website rather than using the WordPress hosted service. If you are using a marketing tool such as Act-On or Hubspot for your blog, then you will be required to build your entire website within that tool to host the blog on the same domain. Since this is not always feasible, we recommend you build your website in a technology that includes blog functionally—which most modern content management systems (CMS) do.

When people share your blog on social media and link to it, they are adding little bits of authority to the domain. Make sure you are getting this credit on your root domain!