Nothing to do with the post, but I wonder why they've chosen to host the blog on a separate domain instead of a subdomain on the official site. I did confirm blog.yelp.com redirects to it, but still it's easy to be suspicious of a separate domain not having the same owners.
As he said, a sub domain is often considered a separate domain when it comes to SEO. His other arguments about naming seems rather hand-wavy, though.
Security-wise, a subdomain can also be a different origin. Which is often positive, so a flaw in your blogging software doesn't allow someone to extract cookies or so from the main site.
On the about page, they also state that its linked and that they registered a new domain because they wanted to host on wordpress.com instead of dealing with large traffic themselves and apparently wordpress.com won't work on a sub-domain (or something along those lines).
Generally I think that's a side effect of outsourcing. They point a subdomain of their domain at wp.com or whatever blog host and leave it at that. Of course the blog host is going to make it a default that the corner link go back to themselves. Traceroute to the blog and I think you'll usually see that it's a separate host than their www.
There are little quirks in the service that make it seem pretty obvious the (first) custom sub-domains and then (later) custom domains were added on later. The namespace issue seems downright silly until you remember that fact.
Now that every blog is on its own subdomain at the least, I'd imagine this could be cleaned up - hopefully with the ability for custom URLs at the same time...
Top post HN (check), interesting title (check), innocuous title (check) -- click -- "Blocked by Security Policy" (huh?)-- .xxx domain? wtf! damnit! now i have an xxx domain logged to my corporate login... EXCELLENT. thanks.
Really though... Is there some sort of clever reason why this person's blog is on a xxx domain aside from annoying people like myself stuck behind corporate proxies?
It's a matter of PR. A blog subdomain and the bare domain will have two different PR scores. The blog subdomain will receive links and that will add to its PR. If the blog is on the bare domain then PR transferred from links to the blog go to the bare domain. That gives you more PR for the bare domain than if you were to split the two out. It's a design decision in how they see separate domains.
Why, simply because it's hosted on a different domain? It seems to help people reach an audience wider than they would otherwise, which is anything but bad for branding.
WR currently considers subdomains as a part of the main domain.
Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense.
Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation.
WR currently considers subdomains as a part of the main domain.
Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense.
Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation.
For me, even if aiba.wufoo.com and wufoo.com/aiba point to the same IP address and have the same functionality, the former feels more like my site, whereas the latter feels more like my part of someone else's site. If you want to create a service that gives people their own presence on the web, this could make a difference.
Alternatively, maybe most users don't pay attention to URLs or look at the distinction above in the same way we developers do.
Also, the subdomain strategy seems to have worked well for Blogger. They serve users' pages from *.blogspot.com, and their own pages from *.blogger.com.
reply