Congratulations to Citizens Against Government Waste, which recently launched a blog, Swineline. Unfortunately, Swineline suffers from the same irritant that afflicts the blogs of the Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Project on Government Oversight: It resides on a domain independent of the host organization (e.g., www.swineline.org instead of www.cagw.org/blog).
To me, this is myopic and counterproductive. Why build and drive people to an entirely new site when, by integrating the blog into your already developed site, you can centralize your traffic?
With two sites comes twice the administrative burden, whereas with one site, readers are never far from the organization’s press releases, action alerts, e-newsletters, op-eds, white papers and the all-important donate button.
Who agrees? The Sunlight Foundation, the National Taxpayers Union, the Capital Research Center, FreedomWorks, Judicial Watch, and American Solutions. (The Club for Growth doesn't count, since its Web site is its blog, and while the Acton Institute's blog shares the same domain as its site, the blog doesn't maintain the same template, which cuts off easy access to the press releases, action alerts, etc.)
Related: When will AEI and IJ enter the blogosphere?
Cross-posted at No Straw Men.
Comments
Why not do both using a redirect?
If they're attached to the new domain name redirect it to a blog integrated with the Cato Institute. The domain name is catchy and might pick up traffic just from that so they could capitalize on both.
FreedomWorks blog
Good post Jon. It's a tension for us at FreedomWorks...we've integrated the Wordpress backend with the rest of our site so the blog content is distributed in relevant areas across our main site. But we've also recently redesigned the blog to make it more independent-looking from the rest of the site, and we've just added the domain FreedomTalks.org as a way to directly access the blog.
From an SEO Perspective
You'll want them on the same domain. Google primarily is driven by the number of inbound links and who the links are from. Ideally, you want the links to the blog to benefit the main site and vice-versa. Being easy to find and effectively owning that space is key.
* Disclaimer: I built the stuff for both Judicial Watch and National Right to Work... and this site. ;)
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