Mike, the one point to clarify is whether you feel that Thomasnet.com is performing well? or whether the sites which pay Thomasnet.com for links are performing well?

If Thomasnet.com is not paying for any links themselves, then there is no reason for them not to perform well.

My understanding is that Google would penalize the BUYER of any links by removing the value of any paid links. There is much speculation about whether Google takes any additional steps. They could penalize the seller and they could further penalize the buyer, but I am not aware of any confirmation to either point.

Hi Matt.

Perhaps I misunderstood the question but I believe Toren only wishes to prevent the subdomain from being indexed. If you restrict subdomain access by IP it would prevent visitors from accessing the content which I don't believe is the goal.

Toren, I would not recommend that solution. There is nothing to prevent Googlebot from crawling your site via almost any IP. If you found 100 IPs used by the crawler and blocked them all, there is nothing to stop the crawler from using IP #101 next month. Once the subdomain's content is located and indexed, it will be a headache fixing the issue.

The best solution is always going to be a noindex meta tag on the pages you do not wish to be indexed. If that method is too much work or otherwise undesirable, you can use the robots.txt solution. There is no circumstance I can imagine where you would modify your htaccess file to block googlebot.

A test was done a few months ago. While the test concluded a hyphen harmed the rankings, the test only involved one example (3 sites) and the content was not the same, although the content was moved between sites.

http://blog.silktide.com/2011/06/how-one-tiny-hyphen-destroyed-our-seo-efforts/

An offsite established blog such as Google's blogspot or WordPress.com can benefit your site. Those types of sites overcome several of the challenges which arise when you try to set up a blog.

Advantages: quick and easy to set up, a unique C block for hosting, no worries about site maintenance, etc.

Disadvantages:

• your blog content would not be on your site so would not benefit from the main site's DA. Also, your main site wont benefit from the links your content will hopefully generate. While you can link from your blog to the main site, it is not as beneficial as having a direct link to your site.

• as Alan shared, your main site would also lose out on the freshness benefits a quality blog can offer

• internal linking is also a fantastic means of properly directing the flow of PR throughout your site. With a single site, there is software which can automatically generate all your internal links as appropriate. For an external site, you would need to manually create all the links which is a lot more work.

Overall the best results should be achieved by integrating a blog into your existing site. You could choose an external blog and it can benefit your site, but not as much as an internal blog would.