Is it worth to change a blog from a subdomain to subfolder?

[Montse]

We have a blog in a subdomain since some years and we are thinking about moving it to a subfolder, to see if we can boost the main domain (incoming links + fresh content).

Could be worth it?

[AlanMosley]

You will get both answers yes and no here.

I say no, google can see that they are the same site, I have planety of websites that do this and rank well, some have sitelinks in the searps showing links to the subdomains.

Google and have said tha there is no difference in most cases.

Also the fact that you would have to 301 rediret and lose a bit of rank by doing so i would not do it,

google WMT will show links comming to your main site from the subdomain as internal links, they know it is your subdomain.

have a look at the links for this site in teh site links, they are from subdomains.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&biw=1106&bih=692&q=iboats&oq=iboats&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=2541l3822l0l4620l6l6l0l0l0l0l268l1161l1.2.3l6l0

[EGOL]

If you have viable subdomains with good unique content and links of their own I would say that the answer is  YES.

In early 2011 I redirected two subdomains page-by-page into folders in the root and the results have been kickass.

Both of these subdomains had 40-60 pages.  Each of them had a lot of traffic and inbound links. One had more links than the root domain.  Now my rankings and total traffic are significantly up everywhere.

Lots of people think that google treats subdomains as separate sites.  This makes sense as on lots of sites subdomains are operated by a diversity of people.  So if you increase the link popularity and domain popularity of your main site by the redirection of a subdomain then it should, in theory, rank better.

The people who redirect subdomains and say that they "got nothing out of it" usually have subdomains that are  worthless cabooses on the butt of their site.

[Montse]

Thanks for the answers.

For some thing Google treats a subdomain like a subfolder but for other things like a different domain, that's why I don't see it clear.

Any experience doing it when the subdomain is a blog?