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Its a no questions asked answer- SUBFOLDERS-  by creating subdomains it's like saying your a separate entity and by doing that you will not be sharing all the value from the main domain and all the domains combined ie. pagerank, pages indexed, links, etc.

I haven't checked out the sites but what are the relative registration ages?

Use the google category and google product type in your adwords product extensions for best chance of getting product/image ads showing in search results. Make sure your campaigns/product types in Adwords are matched to your product feed.

Excellent, thanks guys. Great to hear some experiece that backs up all the stuff you read out there!  I appreciate the confirmation.

We use advanced links manager with SEOmoz's Linkscape. You can also compare your OSE reports over time.

Well a bigger piece of the puzzle is probably that a LOT of the anchor text into these kind of sites is going to be that exact match phrase, so I think it's not specifically a problem being able to identify a brand will fix for every site. I agree though that Google is definitely making moves to better identify brands.

Here's some ideas from yesterday -http://www.seomoz.org/q/site-structure - maybe worth checking some of them out.

Oups ! such shame, i mix the command up this morning ! in fact i used "link:" instead of "site:", and i have been misleading by the fact that my visits are down days after days with about 80% less than the previous month, so i tried to find a reason... Awfully sorry about that..now all the work is to find what 's happening about such drop in my visits... Many tks to you both  Barry Smith, and Jonathan Fashbaugh..

Actually, RSS feeds are also used as a defensive method of link building. YOAST makes a plugin for Wordpress that everyone should use (if they use wordpress), one of the features is inserting text and links into your RSS feed. Obnoxious scraper sites use RSS feeds to populate their websites, they do not monitor the content, its all automated. By putting links and a citation in your RSS feeds, this lets you at least get a little benefit from their theft of your content. Link Explorer shows feedburner and a couple other RSS agg sites as high value referring sites.

Awesome stuff! This isn't an entirely reliable method, but for really quick assessments of what pages are strong on a site, doing a site:yourdomain.com search can show which pages are relatively strongest. Like I said, it isn't perfect data, but it takes 5 seconds and can reveal pages that you might not have assumed are the strongest that may be doing well with a combo of internal and external links.

Just a thought as well to add to what everyone else said.  Make sure you go into your Google webmasters and tell Google what country you want them to rank up for. I have had odd instances when a site with a co.uk extension will still rank up in the US for terms even though I don't want it to.  So I advise you to set them. Have a nice day.

I agree with what David said. Also, Google says they do not want to index search results in their search results. I'm unclear how this would be implemented, but you do also want to think of what is a useful results page for your searchers, and will a q=keyword result provide a better or worse results than /biology. I worked for a site that included (among other things) lesson plans. There was one for physics that didn't require calculus. If you did just a keyword query for calculus, you would get the result for that physics plan, as the description included the word calculus.

hey johnsantillan, I like your response.  can you do me some justice?  what do you think of my home page www.bestfitbybrazil.com?  I get good pull on my keywords, but many pages I've optimized for specific keyword don't have much pull and searches send them to home page.  and the grade for my home page for several keywords are F.  How can i possibly optimize homepage for several keywords to the level of A?  I have done this with other pages on site, but home page keeps winning the search. ??

Hi Peter, I like jonsantillan's list--Google trends is an especially sharp tool for uncovering blog post ideas in your niche. Find what's "hot" and be the first to write about it. If your content is good, it may become the source that everyone refers back to (i.e. major link bait). Another tool that I've found really helpful for uncovering long-tail keywords is Market Samurai.  It's a piece of software that runs on Adobe Air (any operating system). Beyond generating extra keywords, MS has a lot of filters that help you prioritize your keywords, even beyond what Wordtracker offers. It will also return the daily estimated CTR for owning the #1 organic rank!. You can start with a free version, but even after the trial is over you can use the keyword research functions without restriction.

A link is a link is a link. Throw the right anchor text in there and it will be more powerful.