WordPress in Sub-Domain or Directory
Posted: November 11, 2010 to News Flash.
I wanted to take a moment to mention the success we have had in placing our client's blogs inside the main site rather than in a sub-domain.
In 2009 we started placing our client's blogs in a directory of the main site rather than in a subdomain. We now have well over a year of evidence that suggests having it in a directory increases the main site's ranking in search engines and does not hamper the individual blog pages from being indexed.
The big payoff is that by placing the blog in a directory of the main site, the main site now has more pages and those pages are more frequently updated. It's well known that Google considers each sub-domain a unique site per their webmaster guidelines for submitting Sitemaps. Yet for years we I have heard from SEO experts that it doesn't matter where a blog is placed, but now I'm starting to hear them say it does matter and placing it in a directory is the way to go.
The next question is always how to make WordPress work as a directory in the main site rather than the typical sub-domain installation. The installation is simple. Giving WordPress the same design as the site is the challenge. Since we build only custom designed sites and WordPress is so popular that clients ask for it by name, we came up with a way to give WordPress pages the same look as the main site. We achieve this with a special WordPress theme and PHP code we have developed that shares the same Smarty template files we use for the main site. This way when we make a design change to the main site, it updates the WordPress design at the same time. We also use an XHTML to HTML plugin we developed since we build most of our sites using the HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype.
Here are some examples of WordPress blogs we have installed as a directory of the main site using the same design as the main site.
BCBSNC Health News
http://www.nchealthplans.com/news/
Marketplace-Solutions
http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/