Andrew put me onto an interesting article this week in which it was suggested that adding your blog under your main business domain was the way to go. Check out: http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com/2006/10/02/object-lesson-on-blogging-for-your-business/.
Due to the very nature of a blog (compared to your business website) it is highly likely it will receive more inbound links and therefore the Google Page Rank is likely to be higher. p.s. I’ve got some issues with using Google Pank Rank as an indicator of how well a site is doing (buts thats for another time).
The article suggests that by putting the blog and the main site together on the same domain will therefore increase the main websites page rank. This is very true, but I think before that decision is made, you need to consider a couple of other factors:
1) Blogs can be free flowing and at times very opinionated. By aligning the blog directly with your main site, you need to think about what impact (good or bad) it may have on your brand.
2) Keeping your blog independent allows you to offer thoughts, ideas and advice as a more independent source, allowing you to recommend your products subtlety. If the blog is aligned with the domain one may view you as having an ulterior motive in your messages.
3) Having an optimised blog on a separate domain provide one hell of a good link into your main site domain.
From a profitable website point of view, both options have their benefits, it really depends on your point of view and what is important to your business.
- Mike
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First a note on page ranking etc. Agree with you Mike that other indicators are more important than Googles PR to see how well your site is doing.
Two comparisons I would like to make: my own (WYL) sites have a maximum page ranking of 2/10 (compared to this blog – index page – of 4/10). Another indicator I use is Alexa rank: highest rank on my site: 297.407 compared to this blog – index page – : 1.292.717 (mind you: the lower the number the higher the number of traffic etc but Im sure you all know that).
Our new typepad WYL blog (launched just over a week ago) has its own domain name (does contain the company name though), but all pages of my normal site have links to the blog. And most visitors to the new blog come from the normal site. Although indexed within a week by Google, MSN and Yahoo, PageRank is 0/10, while Alexa rank is 777.309.
So links from your normal site to your blog drives traffic to it (and getting you a good Alexa rank), plus if your normal site is already popular, the spiders will follow the new links to the blog, indexing it pretty early on and therefore getting it on the search-results early on.
(Not bragging, but today my brand new blog ended up on the first page of search-results: number 6 of 440 results)
But more important from our business side point of view: weve added another method of becoming The Expert in our field and first impression is: its working
Three weeks ago (exactly) I launched my blog Kiss2 and Mike arranged to put that blog under the existing domain name of The Kiss Business.
Today I remembered this topic when I noticed that the new blog ‘already’ has a page ranking of 2/10 while the WYL tips and advice blog (also under typepad) launched 19 September as woodyoulike.typepad still has 0/10.
As mentioned earlier: I don’t pay much attention to page ranking (WYL blog receives many more hits and visitors than the Kiss2 blog) but I thought it worth mentioning that on page ranking Andrew is right.