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Can you have more than one blog on a domain?
By Mike | March 14, 2008
Here is today’s question from the Q and A call.
My question is can you have more than one blog on one domain? Like www.yourdomain.com/blog/ and then have another blog at www.yourdomain.com/wdbog/ ? Is this possible or should someone get different domains for each blog?
This is a good question which is why I wanted to answer it here.
The answer is yes you can have more than one blog on a domain. Now for the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. One other thing I would recommend that you use sub domains instead of a folder if you are going to use multiple blogs. This means your url would be http://blog.mydomain.com even though the files would go in a folder on the server the same way. The search engines treat the sub domains as a different site and tend to index the separately.
Now let’s look at why you would want multiple blogs on the same domain and when it probably isn’t a good idea.
If your main domain is on a broad topic like dogs and you wanted separate blogs on
-
Greyhounds
-
Dachshunds
-
German Shepherds
-
etc
That would work because you would be getting keyword rich domains like http://greyhounds.mydogsite.com that are related.
Now if you had a golf domain and wanted other blogs on topics like
-
Race car driving
-
Stop smoking
-
Model airplanes
-
etc
This wouldn’t work.
As always you can let me know what you think good or bad and ask your questions by commenting or using the survey form.
Mike Paetzold
Tags: blog questions, blogging, Mike Paetzold, multiple blogs, subdomains, wordpress questions
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March 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Hey Mike,
What if your main domain name is your name…..
http://yourname.com
Would’nt be OK to set up redirects for several blogs of different subjects, like…
http://yourname.com/checkout/dogs
http://yourname.com/info/golf
etc…
Ron Chaney
March 14th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Hi Mike.
Would I be right in thinking that if you created several blogs in folders (not subdomains) there would be a problem with the index.php at the root? — as in: which blog folder would it be connected to?
And that this is one reason why subdomains are better?
Gary Harvey
FindHotMarkets.com
March 19th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Ron,
Sorry for the delay in answering I haven’t been feeling well.
I personally, would prefer the main domain to have my keywords for the subject in it.
So if my domain was mikesdogs/labs and mikesdogs/poodles that would be good.
But to have myname and golf and dogs there is no relations.
Now a site like yourinfo.com and various subdomains would work.
Just my opinion.
Mike
March 19th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Gary,
No folders would work fine and properly installed you will have no trouble.
The reason for subdomains rather than folders is that folders are indexed as part of the whole domain and subdomains are treated as if they are a unique site if my understanding is correct.
Mike
March 24th, 2008 at 1:03 am
I have a couple of domains with two blogs and I’ve experimented with putting them into subdomains or just folders and haven’t seen any real differences in terms of search engine results.
This isn’t definitive, just some trials I made.
In the future, I think I would want to put the blogs into subdomains.
One reason I haven’t done it on a couple of established domains is because creating the subdomain caused some weird and still unexplained problems with the dns and I eventually removed the subdomain and the problem cleared right up. I never was able to determine the cause of that problem, but decided to stop fighting it.
At one point, I had a domain with over a dozen blogs on it. I won’t do that again.
One reason you may not want more than one blog on a domain is the possibility of weird interactions when handling errors - especialy 404 errors.
On one of my domains, even if someone encounters a 404 error outside of the blogs, one of the blogs has decided to handle it, even though I have custom error pages for the domain as a whole. I haven’t solved the problem, but admit that it is a low priority at the moment.
I find that it’s best to have a separate domain for each blog, and I’ll probably move the offending blog from the site and onto a domain of its own when I have the time.
Act on your dream!
JD