does google treat subdomain as a independent site?

does google treat xxxx.domain.com as a child site of domain.com?

 

Most people look at it the way that Google see it as an independent domain.

 

That's what I'd always understood...but I noticed recently that google.com/webmasters shows links from a main site to a subdomain as internal links, not external links.

So I'm not so sure how separate they are.

 

They are counted for the most part as separate but when Google sees a sub domain link on the main domain page and the other way around , they count it as a internal link. I think this is to prevent someone from making hundreds of sub domains to try to build back links.

 

That is precisely my experience.

 

And Google have also banned the main domain from the index if it has a lot of SE spamming sub-domains.

 

subdomains are completely new domains in the eye of google. according to google , xxx.sitename.com and www.sitename.com has no relation