For SEO purposes, is it better to have a blog as part of the site (such as a category on a wordpress site) or in a separate directory on the site. Do the search engines consider mysite.com and mysite.com/blog (where blog is a separate directory) to be 2 separate sites and do links from mysite.com/blog to mysite.com carry more weight than links within mysite.com? Any help would be appreciated.
In general, a link from one site to a completely separate site will carry more weight than an internal link within a site. But the search engines are savvy to what you are suggesting. If the engine detects that the two sites are related (for example, if they are operated by the same company), it will give the link less weight that it would do otherwise. Note that it won’t penalise you in any way. It just treats the sites as as single site for the purpose of valuing a link.
Of course, this assumes that the engine is able to correctly detect the relationship between the two sites. I’ve no idea how successfully they do that.
With that consideration in mind, it doesn’t really make much difference which of the two strategies you adopt.
Mike
Thanks Miki - that’s what I needed to know.
Dan
Blog attach with your site would be consider as internal link and blog on other site would be consider as in bound link. Both are valuable but in bound link have more weight age than internal links.