Wordpress blog integration with full website effect on SEO

[CodyWheeler]

I have searched and searched for the answer to this question and can't find it.

We are going to be launching a Wordpress blog on our domain shortly, however we have a much larger site that is mixed with static and dynamic pages full of custom programming tied to databases, etc. that we are running around the blog and can't integrate that into Wordpress due to its complexity.

What this means is we have to install Wordpress on our servers somehow separate from the pages of our website.

What I am wondering is if we run Wordpress in the /blog directory of our site as a separate installation if it will inherit the domain authority of our domain (currently around 60) or if it will be viewed as a separate site and get no ranking. Also, will our main site inherit the additional link juice from the inbound links that we get from the blog with it being separate from the main site?

How does this need to be setup on our webservers to ensure the blog gets authority of the domain, and the blog contributes maximum SEO value to the domain?

Any help would be appreciated.

[stevenmusumeche]

Put it in the /blog subdirectory and your main domain authority will pass to it.  Make sure you link to the blog from your main site.  We have the same issue as you, and at first hosted on blog.domain.com but later moved to domain.com/blog based on advice from many people at SEOmoz.

To make sure the value is passed around, be sure to liberally link to and from the blog to other areas of your site.

[Loganshark]

We can only speak from our experience, but we have had a similar setup on our site now for about 9 months and the effect that our main site's authority has on the blog seems to be slight.  I don't think that Google or anyone else sees our blog as a separate site altogether, but it does seem that they recognize that that portion of our site is a blog and the rest of our site is e-commerce and index our pages accordingly.

Additionally, because our blog discusses a much wider range of topics than just what we sell on the site, it seems logical that some of our site's authority might not carry over to the blog pages because the content is so different.

All of that being said, the effect of our blog has been very positive. It has increased our organic traffic and is a great way to add new content.

[CodyWheeler]

Steve, Loganshark, thanks for sharing your experiences. I figured that this would be the case. Just wanted to get confirmation from people who have done this successfully.

Any additional advice from anyone would be appreciated. This project is a big step in our SEO initiative.

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[CodyWheeler]

I don't know what the rest of that passage says, but I don't see in that excerpt how the author says they should be separate. All he is saying is what a blog is meant to accomplish.

It can still be a part of your site, hosted on your domain, without being fully and completely integrated with all of the pages. It can look a little different, have a different feel about it, etc, but still be run within the parameters of your website.