There's been an ongoing debate within the legal marketing community whether it's better to host law firm blogs at custom domains, or subsume them within a law firm's website.
Our view has always been that to maximize the SEO benefits of a blog, the “best practice” is to host the blog at its own custom domain. This will allow the blog to develop its own ranking within Google’s index in connection with a narrow topic instead of getting lost within the broader range of content at the website domain. Hosting a firm blog and website at separate domains also enables both the blog and website to earn “inbound link” credit with Google by linking to each other.
As an example, see a leading blog on corporate governance, Pomtalk.com, published by Pomerantz Haudek Grossman & Gross, which is deployed at a custom domain different than the firm's website (which provides a more general overview of the firm's class action litigation practice focused on institutional investors).
We were thus happy to read Steve Matthews' recent post at the Law Firm Web Strategy blog, in which he nicely lays out the arguments for and against custom domains for law firm blogs. In the end, Steve concludes that the better practice is to host the blog at a separate domain (he notes at the outset that blogging pioneer Kevin O'Keefe agrees, but one has to admit that Steve is a more objective voice on this subject since he does not sell blogs; he simply optimizes them).
Personally, I think many times when a vendor recommends building a blog within a website, it's mainly because they are unfamiliar with law firm blogging best practices. And to be fair, for budget reasons, a law firm may also want to take the cheaper route of deploying blogs within its website. But since blogging done correctly can provide a great ROI, it makes business sense to invest the extra dollars upfront for what is likely to be a far better result.
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