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Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

Really well written article, thanks for sharing. One thing I would change though:

"It is hosted under blog.whyspam.me because a subdomain’s PR goes towards the main site."

In my research and experience, its more beneficial for SEO to host your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com. The reason being that Google treats subdomains as different sites.

You're still linking from the blog to the main site, so a good bit of PageRank will pass through, but you might have an even better impact were the blog hosted on the same subdomain.

Cheers!

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That's my understanding too. We just moved our blog from blog.menuism.com to http://www.menuism.com/blog/ - hoping to see some gains from it.

I would prefer to use blog.mydomain.com and then do a 301 redirect to bring all Google juice into the main domain.

301 redirects don't pass 100% link juice so why waste backlinks to a subdomain that you don't plan on actually using? Are you just saying have it available as a convenience thing in case someone tries to guess your blog URL?

Is that true? what about 302 redirects?

As far as the guessing for blog name if your 404 pages are good enough it won't matter, for me if you go to http://whyspam.me/blog they'll still see the link to the blog, even though you're viewing a 404 page.

Avoid 302 redirects, they pass no PageRank.

301's do dampen PageRank as well, though the exact amount is not known. I've always put it around 10-15% (i.e., after each 301 you are left with 85% of the original value). I also suspect that its contextual - so a 301 from www.mydomain.com to mydomain.com would probably be dampened less than a 301 to a completely different domain (e.g., bit.ly).

just checked and apparently blog.whyspam.me is only PR3 looks like you could be right.

Most people don't seem to realize that PageRank is per page, not a site wide value. So it makes sense that the front page of your blog has a different PR than your homepage.

See Matt Cutts for more about subdomain versus subdirectory: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

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