Between using Subdomain and Subdirectory

Recently i’ve seen various people asking at various webmasters forum out there, whether they should use a subdomain or subdirectory for their own site. And i asked myself, why they should be confused between choosing subdomain or subdirectory ? because like most of you already know that subdomain is just a subdirectory in your site. With the exception that search engine think that your subdomain is a separate site. And that means Google PR on your main domain and on your subdomain would be different

And to make things clear for you, here’s an example from my site. If you type this on your browser address bar : http://www.reaper-x.com/forums you’ll get redirected automatically to http://forums.reaper-x.com. And as you can see from that example, basically my forums is located under subdirectory of this site, but because i prefer Google or anyother search engine to display it as http://forums.reaper-x.com i'm using a permanent redirect using modrewrite and if Google decided to give PR to my forums in the future, all PR goes automatically to the forums.reaper-x.com

But what if i'm using http://www.reaper-x.com/forums instead of using subdomain ? of course the Google juice from this site are going to be passed easily because Google considered it’s as a subdirectory, which means you do not have to wait longer to get pr into your new forums

Although that is depend on your point of view, if it’s for me i prefer to use subdomain rather than using subdirectory because subdomain looks more professional to me and you can manage subdomain easily because everything inside that subdomain is considered to be in the root directory :) .. although it’ll really take sometime before your new subdomain get the Google Juice .. but that’s just my own opinion of course :)

As an addition, if you’re interested on using modrewrite on your subdomain or add-on domain, you might take a look at my previous post about using modrewrite on addon domain / subdomain