Can creating a subfolder and seperate domain blog build external links?

[cscoville]

So I am currently going through the creation of a blog with a client that has a company that sells tennis equipment. I have talked to their development team, who is a third-party ecommerce platform, and come up with an idea to create an sub-folder (domain.com/blog) with an article page using their existing framework that would feature full articles in a blog format. Then I would create multiple blogs for them using tumblr and wordpress with their company name and a few with unique names targeted to their niche. These would feature snippets of the content taken from their article page (domain.com/blog) with some responses or reviews on the full articles to further their outreach and then link to the main articles on their article page. These snippets would be divided up amongst the blogs and posted on different days of the week to divide the traffic. Each blog will feature fresh content and focus on a rotating schedule of the latest videos, re-blogs,  memes, photos, highlights, scores, upcoming tournament reviews, etc.

I will set each one up to rotate through these different topics on different days and times to create a steady stream of traffic. I want to make sure that I stress the fact that I wont be stuffing the unique blogs with links only to the clients company store, I will be making sure to keep it to an amount that isn't spam worthy.

Now if these blogs feature rich content including the snippets of the articles from my sub-folder page (domain.com/blog) will these blogs pass link juice to the blog set up on my sub-folder?

Also is this a good way to ensure brand awareness and create external links without damaging their reputation?

Are there other risks that people have encountered by doing something similar?

Please share your experiences so I can make an educated decision.

[AlanBleiweiss]

why would you have so many blogs?  it's creating a false link network.  None of the ranking that any one of them could possibly get would even come close to the ranking strength the main site would get if you keep it all self contained.  Then there's the problem with partial duplicate content conflicts, the need to maintain them all, and the potential complete failure down the road if you ever need to change domain names or technology platform on any of them.

It's about the least effective solution I've seen (and I do see a lot of people do it) done by people who think they know SEO yet where I consistently run circles around them by using a much cleaner self-contained approach.

Now if you wanted to have separate subdomains or entirely separate root domains for each of several topics, where each one has completely unique content dedicated to the topical focus of that subdomain or root domain, you MIGHT get some benefit out of that, but in reality, that path is for very rare and extremely complex needs only and not to be attempted if you don't know your stuff at the highest levels...

Better to keep it all self contained - every inbound link to any page, article or section not only benefits that page/article/section, but the entire site gets a boost.  And users don't become confused.