Penalty for creating a blog and linking to your site from it?

[lawboy]

Seems too easy to do. Blogs can be created in minutes.

[cbpayne]

The benefit from the blog will be minimal as it has no PR to pass on, unless you want to do the hard yards and get links to the blog .... then you won't get those unless there is something in the blog that is worth a site linking to.

Surely putting that effort into your own original site would be a better use of time and energies.

[Mohamed_E]

One possible advantage of a subsidiary site, even with minimal PR, is that you can have lots of keyword rich links to selected internal pages of your main site.

But once you start investing real time in the subsidiary site you have to ask yourself: "Would that time have been more productively spent working on the main site?".

[Small Website Guy]

A blog can be created in a few minutes, but so can an HTML page that you host on a free server.

The blog by itself has no PageRank, but there are a few blog directories you can easily submit to and boost your PR to at least a 2, maybe even a 3.

Creating a hundred blogs like this would most certainly be spam. People would get mad at you.

Some blogs have a PR of 6, but those blogs have HUNDREDS of inbound links. I would think that if you LIKE blogging, one could use a blog that took many months of effort to develop as a way to help out your other sites. But you don't get hundreds of inbound links without putting in effort.

The advantage of blogs is that people will exchange links with you even if you have PR 0. Many/most bloggers don't even know about PR. New blogs are usually seen as welcome members of the club and not competition. This same advantage also applies to other hobby oriented sites. With more commercial oriented sites, it can be near impossible to get links before you have PR, and you can't get PR without links, so it's a Catch-22 kind of situation.

You might also considering adding a widget blog to your site about widgets as an additional way to add content to your site. People might link to the blog if it provided valuable information about widgets. But people can tell the difference between valuable, or at least entertaining, content vs a few bogus posts made with the sole intent of adding an extra few pages to your site.

Even though there has been talk about Google possibly discriminating against blogs in the future, I don't think it happens now, and it would be wrong to do so anyway. Blogs are just a trendy way of publishing information to the web, not much different than hand editing an HTML page and then FTPing it to your site. The only difference between blogs and other pages is that blogs have a "blog-like" formatting applied to them.