Using the blogs function to publish long-form guides vs. blogs

[JAxani]

Hi HS Community! 

We're new-ish to Marketing Pro and want to make use of the blogs feature. 

Our current blogs are available at domain.com/blogs and we don't want to change that.

TLDR: We are currently migrating our website to Webflow (not HubSpot, a deliberate choice because of the CMS features we need that aren't easily done in HubDB). Our domain has a lot of backlinks and decent authority, so we don't want to break any links to our current blogs. Therefore, we won't use HubSpot's blog feature on a subdomain for our blog. 

But we have a bunch of helpful guides that don't live anywhere right now aside from PDFs tied to lead magnets. They're on in-demand topics (we're a mental health company, so the guides are about starting therapy, couples counselling, switching therapists, etc.). 

ANYWAY... Our idea is to use the blog feature in HS to post, optimize, and grow these guides. We'd have them live on a subdomain like guides.domain.com. 

Does anyone see any logical problems with this? 

The only one I can think of is that if we really work on the SEO of these guides then we're building domain authority for the subdomain rather than the root domain (I think that's how it works?). 

Any thoughts would be much appreciated!

[JonPayne]

Hi @JAxani 

If you're worried about losing authority if you moved the blogs (as well as guides) to HubSpot, then you could use 301 redirects to mitigate any risks.  I think that's how I'd play it, if you're going to have content live on something.domain.com while your service / product pages live on www.domain.com. It means something.domain.com has a greater volume of relevant content on it, so it's more likely for everything there to rank more highly.  Though I also agree with @Sam1 that it's better to have it all live on the main domain. If you can't do that though, then blogs and guides on the same sub domain would be the best compromise imo.

I think otherwise, your reasoning is pretty sound. 

[Sam62]

Hi @JAxani,

Let's say you've optimized your guides and they've started ranking better on search engines. But in future, if you write any blog post with similar context to your guide, and if it starts performing well, your guide and the blog would start competing with each other causing traffic cannibalization.

Simply put, in the battle of both (your guide & the blog), one of them would definitely lose its traffic since the users will be choosing between one of them.

Another thing is, handling two domains can multiply your SEO team's workload.

That's my opinion and you can disagree with it which is completely healthy.

Thanks,

[JAxani]

Thank you! Great point. 

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @JAxani,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community!

I wanted to tag in a couple of subject matter experts to see if they have any input on this matter:

hi @DavidDennison, @Sam62, @JonPayne, do you have any thoughts on this? Thank you!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team