Subdomains vs Subdirectories

Subdirectories (or folders) are better than subdomains in most cases. Until otherwise you are a big company and there is a specific good reason to do so, then it is okay to go with subdomains. Below are couple of main reasons why you should go for subdirectory.

1. The ranking of the main website will increase, in other words, the rank obtained by the subdirectory will be shared with the main domain.
2. Easy to organize content and files.

Are there any good stuff in keeping subdomains in URL?
1. Lets say you own movies.com (Fandango is acquired by Comcast and Movies.com is a family of Fandango now) – then you can get more traffic if you have subdomains like msn.movies.com and yahoo.movies.com (movies.msn.com and movies.yahoo.com are the correct sites)
2. Like above example – even google has hundreds of sub-domains, most users directly type the url as mail.google.com and there are atleast thousands of users who would type google.mail.com – and for you to see you can check where this url takes you http://google.mail.com

Right now movies.com does not have msn. or yahoo. as their subdomains – so Fandango SEO team can use this as a suggestion!!

Cheers,
Shiva