Hi HaqTech members!

I've been scouring the blogs for this answer. Although I've also read some Q&A content on this question. I just wanted to ask it in a different way.

I'm reviewing a very large news/content site (think 1mill pages indexed in Google). They've split their content into both subfolders & subdomains. I'm convinced that from an SEO perspective all links should target the main domain (www) to keep the link juice all in the same container if you will. However, I just wanted to look at it from a different perspective...

- From an SEO perspective, what is the advantage of usinga subdomain?

- Does Google make the association that link juice on X.mydomain.com should also apply to www.mydomain.com?

So far from what I've read and observed SEO-wise. The only advantages of using a subdomain over a subfolder is:

- From a branding perspective (making it easier for users to type into the address bar)

- Treating each website completely seperately as individual entities (with their own traffic stats, link juice, page rank, etc.)

Looking for confirmation and insights into why the site should continue to use subdomains?

For keeping all domain strength concentrated in one domain, it's definitely preferable to keep all content on the one domain rather than split content across subdomains. One definite advantage with subdomains is that they can be hosted in different places. For example, if you have www.mydomain.com and you want to target the U.S., German and UK markets, you can host uk.mydomain.com in the UK and de.mydomain.com in Germany.

To my mind, there needs to be a very good reason for a site to use subdomains as opposed to subfolders. If there is no solid reason why the subdomain is necessary and better, I would use subfolders.