New website concept and Google guidelines - are subdomains good?

[optimierung]

A lot of clinics are logically grouped together to a large clinic center which is planning a new "website":
Taking into account best practises and regarding now all the possible penalties and updates such as Panda, Penguin etc. would a subdomain concept be a better solution than establishing multiple single domains?
(in both cases interlinking and managing the whole in the right way; Bing and other SEs dont matter)

Very interested in your thoughts about pros and cons.

Thanks in advance

[tedster]

I wouldn't use subdomains unless each clinic can really stand on its own as a kind of self-sufficient website. However, this decision today is not that big a deal. In the past, there were ranking advantages, especially when it came to reputation management. Today - not so much. So the decision comes down to ease of admin for you, IMO.

[optimierung]

@Tedster

As the content quality of the clinics differs very strongly there would be in this case no good choice to use subdomains at all

- because subdomains are treated as directorie and therefore bad content of some clinics can be reducing relevancy of the whole?

- further links between subdomains are considered as internal links?

Both reasons would vote aganst any subdomain solution or is this speculation?.

[tedster]

Sounds like directories is the natural way to go here. Of course, I don't have eyes-on - you do. But there's not a lot of difference today at any rate.

[CoursesWeb]

Hi,
From what i know, if you use multiple domains /subdomains is hard to promote all those websites. But using a single domain with multiple directories you promote all in one.