I am the moderator/boss in a dispute with two of my associates. We have decided to let the readers of Webproworld determine who is correct (we recognize that there may not be an answer that is absolutely definitive since Google never let's us know all of their secrets, but we will go with the majority...majority will rule here).

We have a very active website with over 50,000 items for sale. We have never focused on SEO in the past since we did not have adequate resources, but now we do....we strictly used PPC in the past. One of our first SEO steps is to start a blog. One of us thinks that the blog should be within our website URL. And the other one thinks that it should be a separate url.

For example, here are the two options:

www.examplecompany.com/blog

or

www.examplecompanyblog.com


One associate wrote the following:

The blog does not intrinsically increase your PageRank. The typical strategy is to have a blog that has a comparable URL to the keywords for which you are optimizing (like cleaning supplies, chemicals, whatever), with posts regarding those topics, with keyword-laden links that point to Examplecompany.com. That is one way Google builds PageRank is through that linkback association around a keyword.

The other associate wrote the following:

The blog DOES intrinsically increase your pagerank. Since the SEO guru's have questioned whether Google gives equal value for links coming in from blogs, it tells me that the strategy should be to have the blog developed within the website URL and then create a link baiting/building strategy wherein we strive to get quality links from Blogs AND websites that link directly to the blog URL. Since the Blog URL is maintained within the website, all of the incoming links will increase the value of the website and thus increase the overall pagerank of the website.


Well, we hope that you will provide us your thoughts on this issue? Thanks for all of your help!