How does Google treat subdomains?

[roodle]

Hi,

I'm thinking about breaking off some of the sections of a website I manage into separate subdomains. Will G treat these as separate sites without any relationship to the original www one? I'm hoping this action will make the separated sites more successful through focusing their subject matter plus some rankings benefit from interlinking all the sites.

Any comments or experiences?

Thanks in adavnce

[tedster]

Here's a thread that discussed the last major change I know of - starts at post #2:

News flash from Las Vegas pubcon. Matt Cutts informed us that google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains.

[webmasterworld.com...]
And here's a link to Matt's own article about the topic [mattcutts.com]

[roodle]

Thanks for those links. Ok so Matt says:

A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different

In my case I suppose that is true. The overall theme would be the same for both www and the subdomains but, without wanting to get too specific, the country the content is oriented around is completely different.

If for any single search G will normally only return a max of 2 results for any domain, if the subdomains have sufficiently distinct content this surely wouldn't be an issue then? I wouldn't expect searches related to one site to yield results from more than that single site.

I suppose what I'm really interested in is knowing whether G treats the subdomains as if they were separate domains in terms of PR transfer etc.

[tedster]

PR is transferred through internal links, so PR transfer depends on your linking structure. Subdomains can be like completely independent websites or highly integrated with each other.