So I am going to start a blog I plan to update 4-5 times a week. My current site is starting to rank for popular terms and has a PR4. Should I add the Wordpress blog to a subdirectory of my site or make a whole new domain for it?

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Aaron

Minneapolis Real Estate | Twin Cities Real Estate | Edina Realty Agent

Sorry I don't have an answer but I have one site with the blog on the domain (Cook County) & the other blog is separate (the Oak Lawn sites). I've had my Cook County blog for awhile and my Oak Lawn sites are newer (I've had the domains but have switched hosts on both), so I don't know which situation is better.

However, the on site blog adds a lot of pages to my site. Recently had it deindexed with the Big Daddy update but it is once again getting indexed. So maybe just from that it is a benefit to have it on-site.

Sometimes if I haven't added anything new to my site in a while I just make a blog post and voila - a new page for the entire site.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S.

Well it really depends on what you want to do with the blog. Since you've mentioned PageRank, I'd assume your looking for the best way to leverage SEO with your blog.

I would put my blog into a subdirectory to increase the SEO value to the primary domain, elevating my position within SERPs for the keywords I'm targeting, unless I was already in the top 5 for the keywords I'm going after.

If my primary domain is already at a certain level, and I'm confident that SEO juice coming from other avenues would sustain me, I'd either put the blog on a subdomain or a new domain.

Subdomains are typically viewed by search engines as the same thing as a new domain. Granted there are slight difference and there is a slight advantage of a subdomain vs. a new domain, but they are minimal. So really the difference between having a blog on a subdomain vs a new domain is branding.

The SEO value will be, for all practical purposes, the same in either case.

So it's more of a business decision. If you primary domain needs a revenue boost or you're producing leads from it, I'd placed it on a subdomain. People will tend to check out the main domain afterwards.

If you're looking to go a whole different business direction with the blog then put it on it's own domain.

Just at the end of the day... you'll need to know that if your blog doesn't provide a good deal of content and is compelling enough to link to, you're much better off putting it into a subdirectory as supporting content. If you believe it's compelling enough to live on it's own than you can also reap the benefits of sending link juice from your new domain to your old domain.