Does a "blog" sub-domain help the pagerank of your main site?

Question

I have my main application site https://drchrono.com, and I have a blog sub-domain under http://blog.drchrono.com. I was told by some bloggers that the blog sub-domain of your site helps the pagerank of your main site. Does traffic to your blog sub-domain help the Google Pagerank of your site and count as traffic to your main site?

Answer 1

I don't think Google gives any special treatment to sub domains named "blog". If they did, that would be a wide open door for abuse, and they're smart enough to realize that.

At one time, I think there were advantages to putting your blog on a separate subdomain though. Links from your blog to your main site could help with your main site's page rank if your blog has a decent page rank.

However, it seems like that has changed. Here's an interesting post about setting up blog subdomains vs. folders. It seems like they are actually treated the same by Google now, although nobody but Google really knows for sure how they treat them.

With regard to traffic, your Google ranking is only incidentally related to the amount of traffic your site gets. Google rankings are based primarily on content and number & quality of incoming links, not on how much traffic you get. Which makes sense since Google really has no way of knowing how much traffic you get to your site other than perhaps the traffic they send there via Google searches.

Answer 2

Not directly, but...

I do not know if "blog" specifically helps the pagerank of your site in some special way - google guards its pagerank secrets fairly well. If you really wanted to find out, you would create two sites roughly the same content but one with blog in the domain name and one without. Index them and see if the pagerank settings are different. My gut instinct is - no.

It is known that google indexes the name of the site and it improves your chances of getting listed on the search results if the site name corresponds to the search terms. So, it would be reasonable to assume that (unless google specifically removed indexing of the word blog) that when someone searched for a main search term and "blog" the chances of your site showing up would be slightly higher.

For example, it should help searches for: drchrono blog.

By the way, google changes its algorithms all the time, so this is just speculation.

Answer 3

according to an article on hubspot.com

The search engines are treating subdomains more and more as just portions of the main website, so the SEO value for your blog is going to add to your main website domain. If you want your blog to be seen as part of your company, you should it this way (or the next way).

however they go on to say there isn't a big difference between blog.domain.com and domain.com/blog

you can read the full article here: hubspot article on blog domains

Answer 4

One thing using a sub-domain will help is your sites Alexa rank.

Alexa give rank to all pages using your main domain. If you use the Alexa Toolbar you I see all subdomains have the same rank as your main page. So hit's to your sub's will count toward your sites Alexa.