Does a blog that is hosted a different server hurt my rankings?

[NemsisNforcer]

We recently placed a link to our blog on our site within the past month, which is hosted by a free hosting service. The blog has been running for about 3 months now and contains the same domain as us. We added entries to our DNS server to make this happen.

Our site is www.mysite.com but the address to the blog is [blog.mysite.com....] Since they contain the same domain name, but have different IP addresses, could this be hurting our search rankings?

Our site has tanked on August 17th and I'm not sure if this could add to the sudden drop or is it Google looking at our site differently or a combination of both.

[Quadrille]

It is not the same domain, it's a subdomain - most SEs will see them as two separate domains.

There are advanatages in having everything on one domain; less marketing effort, all incoming links point to one doamin, fewer type-in errors, etc.;

You could easily move the blog to the main domain (domain.com/blog/) and set a 301 permanent direct from the old blog site (blog.domain.com). There would be no pain for your main domain, though the blog itself might dip a little for a while - but if it is closely linked with the main site, it should be fairly painless. And much better medium to long term.

[Adam_Lasnik]

The two-different-servers situation you describe, NemsisNforcer, isn't something we'd see as problematic.

[hvacdirect]

Thanks Adam, I just did the exact same thing and hadn't even thought it would be a problem.

The reason we did it is that the main site is on an IIS server. We wanted to use wordpress for the blog, so I set up a blog.site.com subdomain on an Apache server and 301'd the old blog at site/blog to the new site. Google hasn't picked up the pages yet, but I'm glad to know that having the two on different servers isn't the reason. Perhaps it takes a while for google to understand/trust that a permanent redirect is really permanent.

[Adam_Lasnik]

Yep, permanent redirects can take a bit to get noticed, depending on a number of factors associated with how our crawling and indexing works for different sites. I have personal experience with this (from before I came to Google); one of my sites took a few days, another took about two weeks.

Glad you're using 301s, though; you'd be surprised (and we're often dismayed!) to see how many Webmasters use javascript, meta refresh, and other not-so-helpful redirects in this context.

[decaff]

Yes...you would certainly want the redirect to occur at the server level...so the bots can hardwire the change against the IP, the old to the new url and the root domain name...

So a 301 is the only effective way to do this ... the others are browser specific and can evoke "curiosity" within the algo filter sets...