Does an subdomain hosted offsite provide SEO value

[r1200gsa]

We have a job board hosted through an applicant processing system which we've setup as a subdomain (jobs.ourcompany.com), most of the assets are hosted on our primary domain (ourcompany.com). My question is does having it hosted offsite provide any value? Do we get credit for that content being shared and distributed on the web or does the applicant processing system?

As I see it the options are (correct me if I'm wrong):

1. Host the job listings on our primary domain (ourcompany.com/jobs) and have it point to the application on the subdomain. Advertise the job listings pointing to the primary domain on the paid sites. The free job listing sites will automatically point to the sub-domain because the applicant processing system automatically submits them.

2. Host the job listings entirely on the sub-domain applicant tracking system and link to it from our primary site navigation. Advertise the job listings to the sub-domain so that both free and paid point to the same place.

Obviously the second one would be much easier just not sure on the technical side of our website getting credit by search engines as the one who has produced the content.

[LesleyPaone]

From my own experience blog.site.com and site.com are treated as two different sites. So you might be getting some link juice from your job section pointing to your site, but you are not getting as much equity as you would if the site was in a sub directory and not a sub domain.

[MickEdwards]

Agree with Lesley - a sub-domain is a separate site and equal effort will have to go into optimizing and ranking both sites.

In reality although Google treats the sites as separate the subdomain aspect gives it away, along with a whois lookup - the link value isn't going to massive at all to leverage from.  In other words I would only use the sub-domain for a strong business purpose or for technical reasons, not as a mechanism to gain anything SEO wise. A stronger, well structured and growing central domain will always win.

I think I understand your process and reference to "paid", but even so that word always makes me feel a bit nervous.  So as a side note make sure you no-follow anything that can be "construed" as paid for.

[r1200gsa]

Thanks Michael for the response.

The primary reasoning we were thinking of using the subdomain is technical in that the applicant processing software only allows us to use a subdomain to display our job. They effectively host the job board on their servers and we setup a cname (jobs.ourcompany.com points to ourcompany.jobapplicantsoftware.com). With the content hosted there is sounds like they get the credit or does our subdomain?

My other idea is setting up a canonical tag for the pages hosted on jobs.ourcompany.com to point to ourcompany.com/jobs. I could create two copies of the same content so the users wouldn't know the difference. Wonder if that would work?