wordpress question

[HomerJ]

if you build a blog using wordpress right on their site as a subdomain, eg. subdomain.wordpress.com, how is that affecting seo for the site?

a good example, there is a site called stuffwhitepeoplelike, if you type their name in the url and .com, it will forward to stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress, and that is also what you see in the search engines.

is this only for people who don't want to bother with hosting and uploading wordpress into their domain, etc.? other than that what are advantages/disadvantages?

my friend wants to start a blog, and using subdomain.wordpress.com rather than his own domain name and host. as a domainer i naturally think he should do the latter. but i'm not exactly clear on how the first affects seo and such.

anyone have thoughts on this?

[KMEDIA]

The rule of thumb is that Google treats subdomains as individual sites.

One of the disadvantages is that having a wordpress subdomain exude less authority to the customers/users.