How Buffer 2x Traffic By Deleting Their Blog

A few weeks ago I was poking around the Buffer website, looking at some of their top content.

I knew they had an article that was a MASSIVE link magnet, and I wanted to study that for a potential teardown.

But in the midst of that research, I found something much more interesting, and downright confusing.

Buffer has two blogs.

One is built on the /Library subdomain and the other is built on the /Resources subdomain.

That might not sound super exciting to anyone outside of the marketing industry, but any SEO expert would advise you to have only one main blog.

Not two, and especially not on separate subdirectories!

So, why did Buffer build two distinct blogs on their site? And, why did they delete their original blog in the first place?!

I’m going to explain all of that in this teardown–and show you how they were able to 2x their organic traffic in a few days with this tactic.

Let’s get into it!

Wait…Buffer has two blogs?

Yes! Like I said in the introduction, they have two separate blogs on the /Library and /Resources subdirectories.

These subdirectories are both blogs in the most traditional definition of the word. Buffer publishes similar posts, articles, and other content on both the Resources and Library subdirectories.

The Library subdirectory ranks on about 418k keywords and drives 771k sessions per month that are worth about $1.3M in traffic. New content is published regularly on the Library.

On the other hand, the Resources subdirectory ranks on 101k keywords and drives 53k sessions per month. These numbers aren’t as high as the Library subdirectory but are still very respectable. Also, new blog posts are added to Resources on a regular basis as well.

If you weren’t paying close attention, you might even think it’s a single blog. The Resources subdirectory is even called the Blog. But each of these blogs is built on its own distinct subdirectory.

Some people might say: “What’s the big deal…I bet a ton of brands do this!”

Well, when I looked at some other brands I couldn’t find a SaaS company that split its blogs into two distinct subdirectories like Buffer did.

Hubspot has a single blog subdomain where they publish most of their blog posts and separate subdirectories that house things like ebooks, videos, and courses.

Hootsuite, a direct competitor of Buffer, takes a similar approach with a single blog subdomain and other subdirectories for different types of content.

And even at Foundation, all of our blog posts are housed on the Labs subdirectory.

I feel like this approach is very common, and we could find hundreds of other examples from other SaaS brands.

So that brings us back to the question of why would Buffer do this?!

We have to rewind a few years to explain it.

Buffer built their first blog on a different domain

One of the FIRST rules of building an SEO-driven blog, resource, landing page, or content cluster is …it should be on your company domain.

However, back in 2011 Buffer built their first blog on blog.bufferapp.com and continued to use that subdomain until around 2019.

This makes sense because Buffer was originally built on bufferapp.com, not Buffer.com.

Before Buffer got their current domain, it was owned by a vinyl manufacturer. Buffer only started using the Buffer.com domain around 2015:

But they continued to use the blog.Bufferapp.com until 2019:

So for about four years, Buffer was building links, getting SEO benefits, publishing content, and more to a completely separate domain.

This is wholly different from driving links or traffic to a subdomain like we saw with Hubspot; it was on a completely different domain for many years.

One domain had the Buffer homepage and another one had the blog. In the eyes of Google, these are two separate entities.

Take a minute to consider how many content marketing and SEO best practices this breaks!

Basically all of them.

Not only was this confusing the search engines, but it also probably left many Buffer users a little puzzled.

Yet, I get why they didn’t want to move the blog to the main Buffer domain. It’s hard to change something that is technically working and helping your company grow.

At its peak in 2018, this subdomain was driving around 650k sessions a month, ranking on about 735k keywords, and bringing in about $1M in traffic value per month.

At the same time, the whole Buffer.com domain was driving 415k sessions, ranking on 265k keywords, and bringing in about $600k in traffic value per month.

It was still INCREDIBLY valuable to the team, even if it was on a wholly different domain.

As you can see, it would be hard to abandon the blog.bufferapp.com domain from just a numbers perspective, not to mention all that was happening behind the scenes.

So why am I telling you all of this? Why does it matter that Buffer built its blog on a separate domain?

It matters because that decision to have the blog on a wholly separate domain is a huge reason why they have two separate blogs now.