Wordpress.com content feeding into site's subdomain, who gets SEO credit?

[grapevinemktg]

I have a client who had created a Wordpress.com (not Wordpress.org) blog, and feeds blog posts into a subdomain blog.client-site.com. My understanding was that in terms of SEO, Wordpress.com would still get the credit for these posts, and not the client, but I'm seeing conflicting information.

All of the posts are set with permalinks on the client's site, such as blog.client-site.com/name-of-post, and when I run a Google site:search query, all of those individual posts appear in the Google search listings for the client's domain.

Also, I've run a marketing.grader.com report, and these same results are seen.

Looking at the source code on the page, however, I see this information which leads me to believe the content is being credited to, and fed in from, Wordpress.com ('client name' altered for privacy):

href="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg">class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-2050" title="Could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster" src="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg?w=150&h=143"

I'm looking to provide a recommendation to the client on whether they are ok to continue moving forward with this current setup, or whether we should port the blog posts over to a subfolder on their primary domain www.client-site.com/blog and use Wordpress.org functionality, for proper SEO.

Any advice?? Thank you!

[AndreVanKets]

My understanding is this:

If its a duplicate, as in a copy and paste article, then Google will eventually de-index the duplication and keep the original article.

In your clients case though, they are providing the source links, so google doesnt label it as duplicate content, but sees it as syndicated content.

Look at news sources for example. The same article syndicated on multiple sites are all indexed and stay indexed. (this is the case for your clients site)

What i would tell your client is that fresh and unique content on their site is key for SEO. By syndicating articles, it doesn't provide any benefits for SEO in terms of unique and fresh content, so the operation is pointless unless its for user experience only.

Give them an example, say its the same as giving away articles to other websites, and then reusing them on their site as "second hand" articles. Just because its word press doesn't mean its any different to any other website out there.

Good luck!

Greg