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We have a company website that uses the www version using 301 redirects for all non-www versions but our blog which is a WordPress site is on the non-www version.
i.e, all our main pages are
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/about-us ,etc.

except for the blog which is at
http://example.com/blog

From an SEO perspective does this hurt rankings?

Shannon D'souza
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  • What happens when somebody types in example.com/about-us? Do they get redirected to the correct page on www? Having the blog on no-www could make that redirect harder to implement properly. Users expect to get redirects between www and no-www. That could certainly cause broken links and poor user experience. Those could hurt your SEO. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 01 '17 at 15:41
  • In case someone visits example.com/about-us they get redirected to www.example.com/about-us. But if they visit www.example.com/blog they get redirected to example.com/blog. The blog is the only page on the non -www subdomain. I've read that Google understands that non-www and www versions of the site are the same site and thus doesn't treat them differently. Is that true? – Shannon D'souza Nov 02 '17 at 04:52
  • If you have the redirects in place, I think it will be fine. Your way of doing things is not at all common, so no guarantees that Google will do the right thing. Google usually ignores either www or no-www in favor of the other. With redirects Google should be able to ignore half of each. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 02 '17 at 10:13
  • Alright, thanks. I guess we'll just move the blog to the www version just in case. – Shannon D'souza Nov 02 '17 at 10:39

1 Answers1

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A blog on a subdomain will bring very little SEO benefit to the main www domain of the site.

For SEO benefit you want:

www.example.com/blog

You don't want:

blog.example.com

For more information see: https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Daniel Pressley
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  • So to google www.example.com and example.com are as different as www.example.com and blog.example.com? – Shannon D'souza Nov 02 '17 at 05:02
  • No, I wouldn't conclude that. But example.com and www.example.com shouldn't really coexist. I would recommend www version only. I always redirect example.com to www.example.com to avoid any duplication issues. But you could use re="canonical" as well. The link above should answer a bunch of these questions more eloquently than I can. – Daniel Pressley Nov 03 '17 at 11:30
  • This doesn't answer the question asked. This answer is about a blog sub-domain vs a blog sub-directory. The question is about about blog on no-www while the rest of the site is on www. – Stephen Ostermiller Dec 03 '17 at 12:43
  • Furthermore, the advice that this answer gives about blog subdomains and directories isn't very good. Blogs can be on a blog. subdirectory without any SEO problems. That is how I have mine. As long as you are clear that the are the same site, Google treats them as one. See Do subdomains help/hurt SEO? – Stephen Ostermiller Dec 03 '17 at 12:45