With the changes Google made to how Blogspot links are handled, it was a reasonable concern that they were able to do the same with WordPress.com websites. The original intent of this test was to check actual WordPress.com subdomain websites, however, it was set up the site on the domain and hosted on the same IP range. This will tell us two things about how Google is “filtering” links, by IP range or by domain the link is coming from.
In this test, we check if a comment link from a free WordPress.com site can help or hurt rank.
Transcription below:
Now, let's go to the wordpress.com. This is the free version. So the the difference, if you don't know, is you actually get a subdomain. So it'd be clintswebsite.wordpress.com. And the idea behind that, from an SEO perspective is wordpress.com as a high domain authority, it's got trust by Google blah, blah, blah. And because you have a subdomain on it, you're going to leverage some of that trust, and you're going to rank your page. So we duplicated the test here.
In this case, it's the comments link. There's the comment. It's a nofollow UGC. And the starting point of the page is actually all the way down here at the bottom. And Hunter didn't want to give it any chance whatsoever.
To get the number one, they push the page too, as you can see, it went up to one T slots, not very much love whatsoever. It didn't hurt it. It didn't say stagnant, but it wasn't all that much of a big deal. I checked it again, you see the WordPress site was ranking, click the filters. And there you go it's right.
Again, it's not essentially one position above where it started. It didn't hurt it, but it didn't demoted either. So in this case, WordPress comments weren't effective, not like they were on the domain that we own. Which is weird. We never would have expected a different treatment. But we certainly got it. Could be because that's the domain we own. These are the same IP ranges. But this one is a sub domain, versus the one that we own is actually a domain. There's some money behind it.