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Hello calf, It's a bit of a trick question since there is no right or wrong answer - it depends whether you take a short or long-term perspective. That said, most people say Subfolder is best and this is what various Tweets and Facebook comments on a recent question on subfolder or subdomain in the Smart Insights Linked In Best Practices group showed. But you can argue each case, particularly if you look beyond SEO at branding benefits you may get from a separate domain. Here are the pros and cons as I see them. What do you think? SUBFOLDER Google will crawl new blog posts typically within days of launch Blog inherits the authority of parent site so can rank immediately for terms within posts Backlinks and social mentions generated by the content on the blog can help other contain on the domain i.e. product pages rank more highly Integrates better with main site for better user experience (although often will have a different design) Easier to track with Google Analytics - a minor point - see end of post Doesn't help generate external backlinks for which you control the anchor text, e.g. editorial links within blog copy SUBDOMAIN Maybe technically easier for some setups Has some of the benefits of subfolder in inheriting parent domain authority and separate domain in providing backlinks to main site, but... Needs to establish its own reputation through backlinks from other sites so... Will not rank as highly or as quickly as a subfolder +Info: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-or-subfolders-which-are-better-for-seo/6849/

Patrick pretty much nailed it. For one thing, Google's index is bigger than ours, as they have the resources to crawl a lot more, a lot faster. Our index also tends to focus on somewhat higher-authority links—the ones that will really count in your backlink profile. There's some more information on how the index works and why URLs may be missing here.

i would say its good to get a few links, maybe make it every 3 to 6 months as links can get deindexed or become no-follow over time or even become inactive. one thing to note that if you do see yourself getting hundreds of links from the same site, this could cause you site wide link issues, depending on where the link is placed

Looking for the benefits of using this markup (https://schema.org/LocalBusiness) for profiles. Note: the website lists company information on profile pages, it is not a local business website.