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Hi There, Sub-domains are treated as a  separate entity now, and they don't add to SEO value of the main domain. Any links within the subdomain to the main domain are treated as external links. Since links are coming from an external domain but the same IP, this may be treated a low-quality backlink for the main domain, though people are divided over this but it can neutral to negative impact instead of being positive. As search engines would consider this as unnatural linking. Sub-Folders are treated as part of the domain and pass all the SEO value when connecting internally. Here is a response from Rand Fishkin to a similar question Subfolders are the way to go, but they're hard to do for a lot of organizations. Many CMS' (like Hubspot) make it quite challenging to host a Wordpress installation on a subfolder, but subdomains are pretty easy. Hence, when choosing where to host a blog or a separate content section, many folks go with the easier route rather than the one that requires a lot of technical effort and webdev/engineering time. However, that doesn't mean that they're not losing out - I'd wager that all of those companies would see a bump if they moved their blogs to a subfolder of the same domain. We see this in example after example when sites invest in it, and you can see plenty of folks discussing their own experiences in the comments of the Moz post you linked to. _Source:  https://www.quora.com/Which-is-best-for-search-engine-optimization-a-blog-subdomain-or-blogging-at-a-blog/answer/Rand-Fishkin?srid=2Gsa_ I hope this helps, feel free to ask further questions and respond to answer. Regards, Vijay

Hi, Well the link you posted sounds very shady and probably is, the screenshot was most fun to me as nothing in that screenshot points to some useful code (the advantage you have if you can code ;)). Anyway, programmatic optimization itself is something that I don't see any big(ger) companies do at all in the way they describe it. But in the end you can programatically optimize certain elements, it just happen that often as companies wouldn't have the knowledge, tech, resources, analysis for it in place to make it happen. Optimizing content/ titles/ headings based on keyword data that is automatically analysed shouldn't be that hard if you would really push through on the issues. Martijn.