Quick question on how subdomains impact parent domain rank results. Lets say that xyz.com has a subdomain or product.xyz.com. Does the # of back links to product.xyz impact the rank of xyz.com? What happens if I change all the links on xyz.com from product.xyz.com to service.xyz.com becasue I want the subdomain to be optimized for service rather than product.Woudl that make all the links into product.xyz.com irrelevant when google calculates the relevance of xyz.com for a keyword?
I'm not sure but it shouldn't imo otherwise it is a flaw from Google's point of view because there are many hosting companies that provide subdomains in this format, and therefore the backlinks to these tons of hosted sites would be irrelevant?
Google supposedly made some changes so that sub-domains act more like sub-directories. I have seen some search results, though, that suggest it at least has not fully been deployed.
Again this would surley be a stupid move from Google as wouldn't it mean these free sub domains like 110mb or whatever it is will suffer well the people using them anyway? Directories should just stick to after the forward slash there should be no need to change things.