Do links from my own subdomain to my main domain carry any value?

[Store21]

I currently have a Wordpress blog set up on a subdomain i.e blog@ etc.  I wanted to know whether the links from the blog to my main site carry any value.

[MichaelC-15022]

I'm assuming your setup is something like:

• blog.yourdomain.com  (blog)
• www.yourdomain.com (main site)

Nearly nothing, unfortunately.  You might get some anchor text benefit.  Best thing to do is to move your blog over to your main domain, and 301 all of the original URLs.

[Store21]

Thanks. Swapping the blog to my main domain could prove complicated. I was hoping linking anchor text within the blog might provide some benefit.  Alternatively I can set the blog up on a different domain.  Any suggestions??

[EGOL]

I believe that if your blog is popular and gets lots of links from other websites that the links from the blog to your website will carry value.  The more links the blog earns the more power it will transfer to your site.

However, I believe that if the blog was moved into a folder suchas at yourdomain.com/blog/ then the links that hit the blog will be more beneficial to increasing the authority and rankings of your main domain.

Look at SEOMoz... they have the blog at seomoz.org/blog and their forum at seomoz.org/q     -   folders instead of subdomains.

[AlanMosley]

I have to disagree. google are much smarter then this. If you have a site with subdomains that is presented as one large site with sub sections they will see it as that. If it looks liks the subsites are not well connnected they will see them as seperate sites.

I have found there is no difference between subdomains and sub folders, If anything the advanatge of being able to put keyword in the subdomain gives subdomains the edge.

Of cause link between them well. One other tip I can give is keep all images and css and js files on root domain, any one at google noteicing this would think this site is connected., I would wouldent you.

[MichaelC-15022]

Hmmm...while I agree that Google ought to behave the way you describe, I'm still seeing Google treat subdomains as unloved orphans.  I have a client with very strong domain authority, ranks very well for all sorts of competitive terms on their main domain.  Their e-commerce stuff is on store..com vs. their main site at www..com, and there's a ton of links from the main site into the store (including deep links), but still we can't get any pages at store.*.com to rank.  In fact, most of the subdomain pages aren't even indexed.

Of course, one of the projects on the plate for this client is moving everything from store.*.com to the main domain...early this summer.

[EGOL]

I recently 301 redirected two subdomains to folders on the primary domain.  The results have been kickass for both the pages in the new folder but also for pages throughout the primary domain. Rankings are up!

[AlanMosley]

One example i have is where the root home page ranked very well for very comnpeditive keyword that was a keyword on a sub site the only mention of the keyword on the root home page was in the link text to the sub site.
In fact the home page ranked well for all subdomain keywords

If google wants good quiality results they would easly handle this.

[AlanMosley]

Obviously others are giving different advice, but i would leave it, but i would think about how google sees the subdomain, is it obvioulsy part of the same site or not, is their plenty of linking

[MichaelC-15022]

That aligns with a test I did a few years ago--I had two nearly identical travel sites, one for Fiji, one for Tahiti, each ranking roughly the same for their respective set of keyword phrases.  For the Fiji site, I added about a dozen links to high-ranking related sites (with the keywords in the anchor text).  Within a couple of weeks, the Fiji site was ranking higher pretty much across the board.

The big question:  was it ranking better because it had outbound links with the anchor text? Or was Google favoring it because it linked to other sites Google trusted, therefore it looked like a more useful site for the end user?

If google wants good quiality results they would easly handle this.

Interestingly, there's a few examples out there of things you'd think would be easy to detect and reward/punish algorithmically...but that doesn't always happen.  Just a few months ago, I saw a site with over 200 micro-sites, all on the same IP C block, all with the same domain registration info--and all were ranking well for their keywords!  Surely it'd be simple to spot this as a link farm--but they were still doing fine.

And no, I won't tell you what the sites are

[MichaelC-15022]

Typically when you do this, you're adding both the content to the primary domain, but also all the accumulated domain authority from the subdomain.  Generally we'll see nice effects like what you saw

[AlanMosley]

I also dont think that same ip or same c-block is suuchh a worry.
i have my own servers with only one IP, and links from the same ip seem to work as well as any other.
Obviously if 90% of your links came from the same ip that would ring alarm bells.

Take discountasp for example, a very large hosting organization all on the same ip number.