SEO Blog Hosting Question: External vs Internal?

Question for SEO experts here: If you are going to dedicate your time to blogging and optimizing keywords for a company website, should your blog be hosted externally(on a site such as blogspot.com, wordpress.com ect..) or should you host it internally(on your own server with wordpress software)?

I'm torn on this issue because I can see the positives and negatives for both. Blogging externally and linking to your site can be seen by the search engines as link juice, however blogging internally creates extra content for your site and is extra content is always good.

What do you suggest? I'm sure people here will say why not do both, but what if you only have time to dedicate to one blog?

 

if you want to setup a company blog it is better you have it hosted internally for many reasons, and I will personally setup an external blog in blog spot and wordpress.com just make RSS feeds of my site appear there.. its a valuable backlink u can get plus its all yours.. and u are getting it for free..

if I have time to dedicate to one blog I would got for internally hosted one.. reason? I can sell it if I dont want and make money

regards

 

I would prefer to have it hosted internally due to the content source it will provide for the site. If you set it up externally you will get links from it, but they will all be from a single IP address which will offer little value.

 

Host it internally then you have full control of the server and can make any changes you need to make in the future to the site to improve its rankings. You may get some initial benefits from an externally hosted blog such as being included in their directory but in the long-run for a serious blog the best option is internal

 

self hosted blogs are always good for branding. blogspot blogs are for noobs/starters

 

Hi,

I will go with the Internal option

 

I will certainly go for Internal option as it shows more branding than hosting in external server. As pointed out by others, It also provides additional content and the blog gets benefited from the link juice of the main site.

 

I would definately go with internal blog, as it will help in branding and also provide more content for my site.

 

Thank you everyone for you input and great points, I've decided to keep going with the internal blog we have in the meantime.

 

/agree 100% w/ sultanofseo. If it's just a personal blog to share w/ family memebers or you're running a little test just to see what blogging is all about, then it's ok to use blogger or wordpress.com's version where wordpress hosts it.

But if you plan on dedicating any serious time/effort into your blog or if it's a company blog of any kind, I would highly recommend you get your own hosting using your own registered domain.

 

Place the blog internally to your site. If you host the blog externally you can link back to your site but you will only gain valuable link juice if you spend time building links to the external blog. If you host the blog internally to your site then you gain extra content, can still link to other parts of your site and can spend all your link-building time on one site/ blog instead of splitting the time across two sites.