I work on a uk decorating website with five of our own bloggers all of which reside on the home page of the website on their own separete blogging urls as sub domains - is this a good idea or would google not like this from an seo point of view?

[Pday]

Should blogs that are part of an overall content site be on separate sites and link in or is it ok to promote them as content on the home page of the site and take users off to their own url to view the site.  Is this good practise for seo?

[Adam_Cochran]

When questions like this pop up I feel its best to reference Rand's intro to SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) specifically slides 40-47 which cover site structure.

Separate sub-domains are often viewed as separate sites so you are now building separate value identities instead of one. If it's important to you to give them all a separate blog rather than a central one with multiple authors, then you can still achieve this by simply giving them separate sub-directories.

Sub-domains will not pass value the same way, and will be focused on different content and not associated with the main site.

Back when we had popular sub-domain hosting services like Lycos this is what seperated sitea.lycos.com from siteb.lycos.com and the same sort of thing would happen to your blogs.

If you want them to self promote and the SEO value and content association of the mainsite to flow down to them (and theirs to flow back up) structure it as www.yoursite.com/blog/author1 for each author and you'll be good to go!