Yes, it might potentially harm you. And I believe that once you link to a gambiling/casino site, less people will be willing to get links from you again as some don't want to be associated to gambling/casino sites (bad neighbourhood).

There are a lot of analysis you need to do to find out whether a person is doing BH on their site (just like NY Times hiring a SEO company to research on JC Penny) as there are a lot of plays you can play around with to try and trick Google.

Just some examples:

Onsite

• Are they stuffing keywords?
• Are they using doorway pages?

Offpage

• Are they buying links?(Most common)
• Are they spamming blog comments?

At the end of the day, if you find out that they are actually using BH method, you can report them from Google Webmaster Tools, make sure you put in all your evidence as they would not spend the time analyising each request.

Thanks for your response,

I haven't try apache based redirect and url rewriting, care to elaborate more on these?

Hi guys,

I am planning of setting up a blog within a client's website, due to limitations to their server environment, I can only setup the blog in a subdomain, I have read in some articles saying subdomains don't pass value as well as subfolders. My questions are:

1. Is it true that subdomains can't pass SEO value? For example, if I set up a blog (say blog.mydomain.com), will that improve long tail searches for my website (mydomain.com)?
2. What are some recommendations for subdomains so that it passes more value back to the root domain (for example, internal linking from subdomain back to root domain)

Thanks guys.