When I started out I had no blog on my site and while the site grows I saw the need to add a blog and add regular content to maintain a freshness.
However it’s quite a job to skin the wordpress blog theme to look consistently with the main site. Would take me half a day - I’m not good at it. So I just left it with a simple theme which is quite different from the design of the main site.
My question is how does Google treat the blog? I’m using a sub-directory instead of a sub-domain: main site > [URL=“http://www.scrapingweb.com/press/”]blog. Does it treat it like a on-site section or somewhat a bit like external pages? I suspected it’s the latter because I find that the new blog posts hardly rank as well as the new pages added to the main site, as if Google knows the blog is just auxiliary, rather than integral.
When the visitors navigate from the main site by clicking “Blog”, they would arrive at a page with total different layout / design. Lots of sites do this that’s why I didn’t bother to skin the theme to look consistent with the main site, but does this hurt my SEO?
Maybe not hurt, but not as helpful to the content / SEO as when the blog is skinned consistently with the main site? Because when the design is inconsistent, the blog posts are treated as if it’s not part of the main site thus: 1) NOT enjoying the full SEO power / benefits of the main site, 2) NOT treated as part of the main site thus not helping content growth.
As I suspected, it’s not much different from a sub-domain in terms of SEO if the blog section is inconsistent in design / appearance. It doesn’t share much PageRank juice neither.