Advice needed: Subdomain or subfolder structure for sections of website

[CroDexter]

I am starting new site about fashion. There will be web shop directory, coupons, reviews and forum. I will use separate wordpress installations and theme for every section. Should I use subdomains or subfolders? I am of course mostly asking this because of SEO. I know content should be king but from previous experiance backlinks are worth much more. :-(
I prefer subdomains in this case but I am afraid I will loose backlinks
I read dozens of subdomain vs subfolder articles but still know nothing.

Thank you for advice

[Sand]

Well, I'd say it depends.

I have a site where I have one huge section of strong content, and that's where all my visitors enter. I also have an affiliate section that's weak on content (millions of potential pages, all duplicate from other sites), and I worry that it could impact my strong content.

To try and mitigate the risk, I put them on separate subdomains and no-indexed every page of the affiliate section save the homepage. I haven't had any trouble.

If you have a similar concern with your coupon / directory content (you may or may not depending on how you build it), then I'd at least consider putting those on their own subdomains to mitigate the potential Panda risk.

[goodroi]

There are so many other factors that impact SEO, that it is less important choosing between subfolders & subdomains as long as you have an overall good user experience. Personally I would lean towards subfolders. If you look around you can find plenty of successful examples for both subfolders and subdomains.

I would make sure to have great content. Yes, I think backlinks are much more important than content but if you have horribly weak content, it is much harder to gain real backlinks to that weak content and retain your users. If you are developing a long term site, then a good user experience is your friend.

[netmeg]

I tend to go subdomain, but I really don't think it matters all that much. If I were starting a site about fashion (which is a pretty crowded space with both quality and crappy players) I would be concentrating on a ton of other things before I'd worry about subdomains or folders.

[CroDexter]

This will be site for country I live in. There is no site that is covering shopaholic habits mixed with fashion. At the moment I have a site in another niche with good content and great natural Facebook and G+ fans growth but I didn't build backlinks as did my main competitor and now I have problem with SEO. All in all I feel like Google is still rewarding much more backlinks (even those build by cross linking than anything else). I made good site optikization and I put only good and interesting content. And that is the reason I am thinking about this. I plan to have great site and great content but I feel that is not enough.

[CroDexter]

Just to add one more thing. In this niche I will not rely so much on google traffic but stil I don't want to waste backlinks on subdomains if google sees them on separate domains. Anyway I will always make friendly links pointing to main domain. That seems best thing to do.

[aakk9999]

There is nothing wrong in combining subdomains and subfolders. For example, you may want to put the forum on the subdomain and keep other things within subfolder. I think Sand gave you food for thought.

As far as your observation about links, let me just comment that Google relies on links more when the website is not in English (or not in one of major languages spoken by many people).