This is a brain teaser for the SEO geeks. Most SEO decisions require a trade-off and this one has me in analysis paralysis so I thought I’d ask a few friends for their advice. The question is this; is Zillow’s Blog more useful to Zillow on its own domain or on the zillow.com domain?

Here is the background …

www.zillowblog.com is Zillow’s corporate blog. According to Yahoo! Site Explorer, the blog has almost 2 million inbound links. Yes, 2 million – and remarkably, this is about 400K more inbound links than www.zillow.com has. Now you see where I’m going with this. If we move the blog, Zillow could benefit from the additional inbound links.

So … what’s the possible downside to making the move? There are three trade-offs (that I’ve thought of.) First, but not the most concerning, is that ZillowBlog is one of the top referrers of traffic to Zillow.com. Second, the blog gives us more first page search results for many of our branded keywords. And lastly, and most concerning, is the fact that Zillow Blog is a useful tool for strategically placing strong inbound links to Zillow.com content. With Zillow Blog we can easily improve the SEO of individual pages on Zillow.com and loosing this last capability is what has me most worried.

What would you do with Zillow Blog? Or … where do you host your corporate blog and why?