Why isn't your blog hosted on your website?
Last updated April 26, 2016
Nowadays, marketing with content is on the top of everyone's to-do lists. But not everyone does it effectively.
This is a common issue we see with novice website designers. And even some web "pros" are getting it wrong.
If the purpose of your blog is to gain traffic and increase domain authority, it should be imperative that the blog your company has is hosted on the same domain as your website.
Not WordPress.com. Not Tumblr. Not Blogspot or Blogger. Not Medium.
On your own .com (or whatever extension your domain happens to be).
Be the authority
When search engines like Google take a look at your website and index its contents, among the factors it considers is domain authority. Every page on your site makes up a piece of that authority.
When your content is hosted off-site, Google has no way to know that content is yours.
Did you know that Google even considers domain.com and www.domain.com to be 2 different domains? No wonder good SEO is 2-parts content and 1 part science.
Content matters right?
Unless your content doesn't matter, like fluff content, your best bet is to host your blog on the same domain as your main website. This offers so many long term benefits that you're otherwise throwing time and money away if you do anything else.
Is there a happy Medium?
Sites like Medium are not only hosting your content, they're also putting your content in front of lots visitors who might not have otherwise heard of you. In a way, they are publishers of content as well.
Many people have used the technique of posting on their own blog first, wait a week, then publish to Medium. Theoretically, Google can flag you with a duplicate content penalty, since your content is now in more than one place.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Google is able to figure out the source of the original—the one on your blog—is the canonical one and give you credit because it was posted earliest. After all, scrapers steal content all the time and repost in other places. It's rare this stolen content outranks your own but it could happen.
As with any SEO advice, it can have a shelf-life. What you do today may affect you tomorrow so you need to weigh the pros and cons. The only solid, proven SEO technique that has never changed is to furnish quality content that people like, share, and link to. And the best way to do that is on your own web property.