How much impact does having a keyword as a secondary subdomain have on SEO ranking?

[esendex]

This post is deleted!

[dignan99]

The concensus from recent posts has been that it is not worth changing to a subdomain and losing the pagerank that had been established from the home site.

It has also been established that currently, having a folder that has a high keyword density is superior to that of the subdomain in the short and long term.

It would be best to stay away from the subdomain if you currently have your structure setup with folders.

[MikeParkins]

Would you recommend using sub domains instead of folders if you where starting a new site?

[dignan99]

Unless I was dealing with a LARGE network of sites that did not correlate with eachother all that much I would just stick with the folder/subfolder structure.

The biggest issue comes down to why anyone would want to divide content into a bunch of individual sites instead of having them mesh together.

The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

[RyanPurkey]

All the risks associated with changing the domain structure of a site just to get your keyword in as CNAME just aren't worth it for established sites.  Unless you're doing some distinct branding via the domain structure, I'd just be happy with having the keyword phrase after the 'co.uk/'

[Doc_Sheldon]

As has been mentioned elsewhere, subdomains are, for SEO purposes, considered to be totally separate sites. I cannot see any logical reason for separating two sites unless they are totally unrelated.

For example, if you have a corporation that owns a mining concern and an electronic manufacturing concern, then it might make sense to have them both as subdomains of the holding company's main website.

But for a company that provides a product, and has a separate division to service related products, then I think that using folders would be greatly preferable, from an SEO standpoint.

[Function5]

I agree with all of the above comments. The only reason I'd use a subdomain would be for a members-only area or support section that you don't want ranked or indexed.