Subdomains and PR

Subdomains are google´s friendly?

[condemons]

I have found google loves my competition more than me. Our sites have similar content, same number of external links, quality and audience. At first there is no reason for that.

After a few days trying to know the reason, I saw that they have all urls in subdomains like: [example.mysite.com...] and I have the urls like [mysite.com...]

We have (both) a very larges sites. I see Google have indexed over 50% more urls in their sites! . Also I found Google may believes the subdomains are new domains at all and give them more importance so they have better PR´s and more urls indexed.

Can this be the reason?

[DotBum]

Hi Condemons,

In my experience google does treat sub domains as completely separate domains.

I use sub domains on one of my sites and have noticed that google will give a new page within a site or sub domain an estimated page rank but a new sub domain from an existing site will be regarded as a completely new domain.

Hope that helps. ;)
Niall

[doc_z]

condemons,

there should be no difference for the PR (according to the original algorithm). I doubt that there is any significant difference in the ranking between subdomains and folders. If the Toolbar shows an estimated PR or not, should't have any influence to the results.

[DotBum]

docz - To clarify - my example regarding estimated PR. It obviously has no effect on rankings but it does show a clear difference in the way google treats a sub domain compared to a sub folder. Hence proving that sub domains are treated as individual domains by google.

Does that make sense?

[doc_z]

Hence proving that sub domains are treated as individual domains by google.

DotBum,

I won't make a decision if it proves that Google treats subdomains as individual domains or not, but would it make a difference? Except for the fact that perhaps more results will appear and they are not collected (instead of 'More results from www.domain.com').

[vitaplease]

Basically the pages of subdomains should be treated as the pages of sub-directories (Pagerank-wise).

This old thread might be useful:

[webmasterworld.com...]

What this thread could suggest is that links between subdomains are treated as site-internal links (rank benefit wise) or that heavy cross-linking between domain-subdomains is ok. Which makes sense.