People have been asking lately if they should put their blog on a different IP address from their main web site, which would entail the blog having a different domain name from the main web site. Presumably the reason they’d want to do that is in the hopes of links back to their web site counting more heavily if the search engines think the blog is really unrelated to the web site.

Whether links from external web sites count more than internal links within your own web site has been a source of confusion, but in fact, all links count. There’s no reason to worry about different domain names unless you’re trying to fool people (or the search engines). From an SEO perspective, trying to fool search engines is a very, very bad practice.

Most companies include their blog as part of their own web site — as we do here at Rank Magic. In our case, the blog is atwww.rankmagic.com/blog. Another approach, equally valid, would be to set up a subdomain so the blog would be at blog.yourdomain.com. Either way is fine for both your visitors and the search engines.