How Well Does PageRank Transfer to Subdomains?

[simplesimon]

I have a client with a website on a 4 yr old domain with decent toolbar pagerank and back links for their industry. The website contains information on two discrete service types they offer, and they want to seperate them into two sites. Because of the domain age it was recommended to them that they break the service content into two subdomains, i.e. service1.domain.com and service2.domain.com. Domain.com would still contain some general company information. The questions I have are:
1) How effective will the PageRank transfer be from domain.com to the subdomains?
2) Will the domain age be inherited by the subdomains?
3) How much of a factor will the "service" keywords in the subdomains be in ranking?

My inclination would be to keep one service on the main domain, and create a subdomain for the second service.

Another think I am thinking about is to 301 redirect the main domain to one of the subdomains

Any thoughts about what might be the best way to proceed?

Thanks

[tedster]

PR transfers only through links. As far as I know, there is no "PR inheritance" that happens automatically between a domain and one of its subdomains.

[simplesimon]

Understood. Let me rephrase my poorly worded question:

1) Does PageRank transfer differently through links within domain than it does through links from a page on domain to a page on its subdomain?

2)Does a subdomain gain the benefit of the parent domain's age, at least to some extent?

3) Does a keyword in a subdomain help you more than the same keyword in a directory name?

[steveb]

1) no

[FranticFish]

2) only done this on one site, years ago, but my impression at the time was 'yes'

[simplesimon]

1) no

I've read elsewhere that there is an advantage to having backlinks from subdomains, but if that's true I gather it's not due to PageRank, but another factor in the algorithm.