Is there a difference what you call a blog folder/URL?

[Artashes]

If you are a web hosting company that decided to launch a blog on your website in order to build up content, does it make a difference what URL/name you give this blog? One of the friendly owners started a blog, but chose to install it under /community/ folder name. He doesn't like /blog/ URL out of security concerns

I have two concerns about this.

1. Confusion around the name. When someone thinks "community", they probably think about a forum or a social group, before they think of a blog.

2. Missed opportunity of establishing authority. While you don’t have to call it a “blog”, calling it a “community” may not be beneficial either. I'd call it "company insider", "tech blog", "hosting insights", something that transcends more subject authority.

I thought I'd ask folks with more SEO experience if they think it matters what the URL says when it comes to quality and helpful content that goesinside that URL.

 

[bigredseo]

Technically doesn't matter, but I agree that "community" sounds more like a forum.

From Google's eyes, you don't need it to be in a subfolder at all if you don't want it to be, however having it in a subfolder makes it easier to track. Having a word in the URL also gives you a slight SEO bump as words in URLs count.

Many of our clients call it "news" or "articles" and skip past the idea of "blog".

Whatever you choose, the URL should be short. Remember I said words in URLs matter? Well, same with folders. If your URL is too long, it will get lost on search results if Google chooses to put the breadcrumbs of the URL in the search results. Does it matter? Nope! If your content is good enough, it will rank.

If it's news stuff, make the folder "news", if it's tutorials, or guides, then you get the idea. Blog has become a defacto standard, but I understand if they don't like it.

If it helps, nobody is searching for "XYZ hosting blog" So call it whatever you want, Google's not going to care.

 

[Artashes]

A very sensible explanation, Conor. Thank you.

I was triggered in part because as I recently read Google may have a good idea on how to crawl a website, based on words in an URL. For one, if I had old blog posts, but still wanted to retain them, I'd create a separate folder called /archive/ and then Google would know how to treat everything that's in that folder, and also that it needs to prioritize newer articles that are outside of that folder. Similarly how Google may treat "hosting insider" with a little more authority/value than "hosting blog" or, as you said "company blog".

 

[bigredseo]

Google shouldn't even care about "archive" as being old stuff. It's all about the traffic and relevance of the content in today's searches. If it's old info "Elementor 2.8.5 exploit", an article that we have on our site from January 2020, the number of people searching for it will be minimal (current Elementor is 3.19.0). Still we had 28 views in the past 30 days (odd).

Then, if you have an article like "Elementor\Post_CSS_File Depreciated" - an error that we wrote about in 2019, but something that still happens on a regular basis - even though it's old, it's still relevant.

So the tag or folder of Archive shouln't have much of an effect. If its' relevant, it's relevant. Heck, we have a really old article on our website about "Keyword Density" that was written in March 2011 (13 years ago). It still drives regular traffic to the site even though the info is very minimal. I need to update that article maybe this week

 

[skhron]

He doesn't like /blog/ URL out of security concerns

What security concerns he is afraid of? The only thing coming to my mind is WordPress exploitation attempts, however those happen even without "blog" keyword used, as WordPress is easily detected via multiple ways. The care should be taken to secure the application, not hide its' presence I think