Choosing the Best Blog Hosting Option from Separate Domain, Sub-domain, and Sub-folder for SEO

Jul 27,2021 by Manoj Yadav

In order to gain the desired mileage from your SEO strategies for which you have worked so hard, you need to select the right place for hosting the blog in relation with your website. This is so important that a wrong action can deprive you of the incremental traffic expected by posting the blog.

There is not much of confusion in terms of the options available for blog hosting and following examples are self explanatory:

Separate domain- seperatedomain.com
Sub-folder – domian.com/article
Sub-domain – article.domain.com

All the three options have their own righteous place in terms of individual perspectives. Let us examine these three options in order to enhance our understanding as far as relevance of each of the alternative is concerned.

Sub-folder as an alternative for blog hosting

There are number of advantages of web hosting. The foremost benefit is that Google will instantly crawl new posts maximum within few days after the post has been launched. Secondly you are empowering the blog post with inheritance of your parent website’s authority and this can lead to instant ranking for key words within posts.

If your blog post contains back links, then these along with social mentions that could be generated by the blog content will facilitate product page ranks and other content on the domain. You will be offering an enhanced user experience by posting blog in sub-folder since there is a better integration with main site. Sub-folders can also be tracked easily by Google analytics.

There is only one downside to hosting your blog post in sub-folder because it does not enable generation of external back-links that are used for controlling anchor text. An example to this could be editorial links present within the blog copy.

Using option of sub-domain for blog hosting

This option is relatively as well as technically easy for specific setups and also possesses some of the advantages offered by subfolder. It does inherit authority of the parent domain in addition to separate domain for generating back links to parent site.

However on the downside this option requires it own reputation to be established with help of back-links that are generated from other sites. This obviously leads us to conclude that the option of using sub-domain for hosting blog post does not rank as much as hosting the same in sub-folder.

Hosting blog post in separate domain

This option facilitates you to control as well as generate external back-links for supporting control of anchor text. In simple words you are able to boost editorial links that are in your blog copy back to product pages as well as category.

By hosting your blog post in separate domain it is possible for you to build a robust differentiation to enhance your brand identity. It will empower your blog with enhanced ability of attracting audience’s attention independent of your main site. You can also ensure targeting your blog post irrespective of countries by exercising this option.

There is a word of caution before you jump on this option. You should not expect to achieve competitive ranking for a good amount of time that may extend to few weeks. This will entirely depend on how compelling and informative your blog post is. This will have to be backed by faith and a robust long term commitment for development of back links.

Brief summary

We can summarize by studying all the three alternatives that the first option of hosting your blog post to sub-folder ranks much above the other options.

However, if you are prepared to have patience and possess ability to create engaging content, then the third option of creating a separate domain for hosting your blog post seems to be much more attractive.

This option will empower you to create a plethora of back links by posting crisp and informative content to main site. You will be enjoying a individual authority site that will be solely under your control.

This has been substantiated by experimentation. The long term advantages of hosting your blog post on sub domain and pointing back to parent site may have been well established. In essence the debate between sub-domains and sub-folders can go on and on without a concrete conclusion about which is better.

The reference from Google confirms that the leading search engine has ceased to treat sub-domains separately. It does however attach a minor association between them. Hence it can be safely stated that in order to build an entirely new entity as well as equity, a sub-domain is the right alternative. However, if you wish to establish equity of a single entity or a website one should use a subfolder.

Google analytics perspective of sub-domains and sub-folders

Tracking of sub-domains as part of the entire site cannot be expected due to the fact that first party cookies are served for every single domain or sub-domain by Google analytics. At the most they could be integrated if these happen to be part of subfolder. It is suggested to implement creation of a profile that consists of a filter to facilitate isolation of traffic for specifically that part of site.

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