Removing the 'blog' content slug from URLs

[HurreeMel]

Hi,

Our blog was setup on hubspot sometime ago. The current url structure is blog.website.com/blog/title-of-blog

The second ‘blog’ content slug in the url is defined in Settings, under the main blog settings.

I’d like to delete the content slug so that the url structure going forward is blog.website.com/title-of-blog.

I have a couple of questions:

1. If I delete the slug, will this affect pages already published or only thos published in futre?

2. If it affects those already published, will I have to do manual URL redirects or would HubSpot redirect this automatically?

3. Would this negative impact any pages that are performing well in the SERPS currently?

If anyone knows the answers to any of these, it would be much appreciated.

[jnix284]

Hi @HurreeMel , I’m happy to help answer your questions.

1. if you delete the slug, it will impact all pages, the URL slug is a global setting

2. HubSpot will automatically create a redirect for the slug, this should automatically redirect all of your pages with /blog to be without /blog. Here is the message you get when you save the change after editing the blog slug:

3. Yes, it could potentially have a negative impact, there are a lot of variables though.

If I can offer any advice, rather than changing your blog from:

blog.company.com/blog

to

blog.company.com/

I would recommend actually removing the subdomain and keeping the slug, changing from:

blog.company.com/blog

to

company.com/blog

Here is a link to another thread with the steps to move your blog from a subdomain to a subdirectory with a lot of really helpful information as to why this is a better configuration.

[HurreeMel]

Hi @Jnix284

Thank you so much for the response. It’s really helpfully.

I would love to change the blog over to a subfolder/subdirectory (company.com/blog). However, our main website is hosted on another CMS and, as far as I can tell, you can’t host a subdirectory on HubSpot if your main site is hosted elsewhere. Do you know if that’s correct?

For the time being, I think the only option is to remove the slug for now.

Thanks again!

Cheers

Mel

[jnix284]

Hi @HurreeMel ah, I see - in that case, the subdomain is the only way, and it’s not the end of the world - there are many blogs on subdomains that are successful with SEO, taking the steps to optimize (like removing the extra slug) will go a long way towards your efforts.

Best of luck with the blog, happy to help if you run into other questions!