So I'm planning on a few websites dealing with different aspects of a general area. I registered a domain name about the general area and I see two possibilities of organising the websites, for example: orange.colours.com; yellow.colours.com or colours.com/orange; colours.com/yellow What is best regarding SEO? are there other reasons I should prefer one method?
SEO wise there's really no difference -- except -- that the subdomains can be regarded as almost separate "domains" entirely. Unless "orange" and "yellow" depart drastically from the "colours" main theme, or you intend to publish tons of content for each, I don't see extra benefits between the two.
IMHO, at least Google had some problems with how to treat the subdomains. If you remeber the eiqz2q.org (it´s down now) case you know what i am refering to. Google fixed this or at least tries to do that. But, if Google tries to fix something, millions of sites will be affected too.
I think you should go for subfolders colours.com/orange; colours.com/yellow as subdomains are treated as separate sites by the SEs so SEO wise you will have to start everything afresh.
...on the other hand, you can use it to get free links but it´s a temporary solution, they will fix it little later for sure
So if I have a website www.'apartments'.xxx and i want spain.apartments.xxx or 'apartments.xxx/spain which is best or should I create a new site spainapartments.xxx? and Should a new forum be forum.website.xxx or website.xxx/forum? If I went the way of wesite.xxx/forum does that forum pick up some of the PR\SEO work directly from the main site rather than starting from scratch with a sub-domain? Thanks