Transferring domain equity from a subdomain to a primary domain

[find8]

We currently have a client who has been running a blog for years on Wordpress. We've built them a new website, and want to transfer a lot of the good equity that has been built on that blog, as it gets a lot of traffic and user engagement. However, our CMS we are using does not handle blogs very well, and creates a lot of duplicate title tags and dupe content.

Rather than moving 10 years worth of blog articles over to this CMS, our question is, if we re-point that blog to a subdomain that lives under the primary site, will the primary domain benefit from the traffic / engagement that the blog is getting? For example, the primary site would be www.website.com, where as the blog would be blog.website.com.

 

[djbaxter]

Is the blog at wordpress.com? or is it at www.olddomain.com?

 

[find8]

Its currently at blogname.wordpress.com but we plan to re-launch it to blog.website.com (as a subdomain of our primary)

 

[djbaxter]

It used to be the case that the rank value of subdomains and root domains would transfer to one another in most cases (e.g., see this 2009 article at Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate - Moz). There was also an ongoing debate in those days about whether subdomains or subdirectories were better from an SEO standpoint; more recently, Google has made it clear that there is no advantage either way for subdomains vs. subdirectories.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether the 2009 "wisdom" still applies.

But perhaps that's not really the important question in this scenario. You say that the CMS you're using on the root domain "does not handle blogs very well, and creates a lot of duplicate title tags and dupe content". If that's the case, you're going to want to separate the blog into example.com/blog/ or blog.example.com for that reason. Whether you use a subdomain or a subdirectory these days is pretty much a matter of personal preference.

I have always preferred subdomains personally. Google seems too as well, and Microsoft, and most major organizations.