Question: Does a blog sub-domain help the Pagerank and popularity of your main website? | Hacker News Reader

Question: Does a blog sub-domain help the Pagerank and popularity of your main website?

11 pointsSkeletor8 comments

I have my main application site https://drchrono.com, and I have a blog sub-domain under http://blog.drchrono.com. I was told by some bloggers that the blog sub-domain of your site helps the pagerank of your main site. Does traffic to your blog sub-domain help the Google Pagerank of your site and count as traffic to your main site?

View on HN

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Read his blog. Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who spends his time answering these kinds of questions. The poor bastard.

Unless SEO is your career, don't spend too much time on this stuff. Really. I've seen too many people latch onto SEO like it was eternal salvation with a side of ice cream. Then they descend into endless, almost Talmudically obscure discussions over 302 Found vs 303 See other.

Don't waste your life trying to divine the minute thoughts of God/Google. Just be good. Produce good & original content, link appropriately, make sure your site is fast, and watch your 404s. Get that stuff right and you are 90% ahead.

It's your job to do things that people, real people, will enjoy. It's Google's job to connect people with what they want. Never forget that. Never try to short-circuit the user to directly please Google.

I think it is a mistake to pretend that the world is perfectly just and to ignore the mechanics of how various systems work within it. Many websites receive more than 50% of their traffic from google and so their rankings can count for a lot. It would be great if google's results were a perfect reflection of utility but that isn't always the case. So, at least defensively, many sites need to consider the impact of their actions on their search results.

In agree that 'being good' should be the core of your strategy but ignoring other factors is naive.

This is a good point -- keep aware of trends. But once you are into details of "subdomain vs subdirectory" for your blog, the returns are far below the benefit for the vast majority of sites. Those kinds of differences only help in the case of a photo finish.

If you are really unsure about some minor SEO trick, flip a coin and instead try to shave 100 milliseconds off of your latency.

Google is not run by Dungeon Masters. It's not a trap. A search engine will only pay attention to some feature that distinguishes websites if it helps them improve the quality of results. And its in their interest to communicate the features they pay attention to.

You would probably be better off putting the blog in a subdirectory if it's practical. Google used to count subdomains as entirely different sites, and although they have now moved to treating them more like subfolders, you'll still probably help the root domain more from a subdirectory.

If there are links from your blog to your main website, then yes. Otherwise no. Pagerank is on a page-by-page basis, not on a site basis.

I thought that PR takes in mind the whole site, and the domain name, and the relativity between other pages on the same website?

TrustRank is built on the whole site, so every quality link you get into your blog will make your entire domain more trusted. This is why you see massive sites like Amazon and Wikipedia ranking for everything.

PageRank is page specific.

Sub-domains are treated as a separate site in the eyes of search engines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com