Subdomains vs Folders?

Here's my understanding... Search Engines look at subdomains as a seperate website... and they view folders as seperate pages of the main domain.

I'm not exactly sure if one is better than the other... anyone care to share their thoughts?

- Jared

that comes into play when its about duplicate content on the same site... so if you can access the same part of your page via the normal domain AND a subdomain, its duplicate content under the same adress...

Search engines value websites more if they use a system of subdomains that silo the content properly in a website. Without going into a long explanation of siloing, basically search engines such as Google want to see that you organize your content more logically. Subdomains tell the search engine (and the user) what they will find there. Linking keyword anchor text in any content in each subdomain to the specific page that contains the content for that keyword in the appropriate subdomain or maindomain is proper deep-linking with your site structure.

Ex - www.maindomain.com

Subdomains:

video.maindomain.com
store.maindomain.com
forum.maindomain.com
blog.maindomain.com

Each subdomain should link to each other using keyword anchor text within the site nav and within context of content. Search engines such as Google value this deep-linking strategy.

There is a lot more to understand with siloing, but these are some basics.

Folders are just a way to organize files in your website directory, but usually does not provide any other benefit.