Is a sub domains better than a new domain?

I was asked this question at work today by a company called brammer, I thought it was a interesting question. I spoke to an seo company who were very helpful, but they made me promise to put a link out to them with the anchor text seo company london. They are legitimate, they are based in London and they are an SEO company! Besides, they gave me good advice.

Here is my opinion following research and their help!

The question of subdomains:

The search engines say that they treat any subdomain of a website as a domain in its own right. They say that they give no extra credence or value to that domain, and it functions exactly the same as if you bought a new domain and started with that.

In our experience we have found this to be fairly accurate - in some situations we have found that the engines index new domains faster than subdomains, though we haven't experimented with this under test conditions yet so this is instinct not fact.

What you would be loosing
Should you decide to amalgamate all of your country based websites into the brammer.biz website within subdomains, what you would be loosing is the history and the trust that the local websites have already built up. For example, the brammer.co.uk site was first indexed on the 28th November 1999, it has close to ten years of history behind it which helps its rankings within the engines. Some of the qudos would be transferred if you forward correctly, however, in our experience you always loose out in the transfer.

What you might gain

Your reasons for amalgamating may have fair reaching business effects that have nothing to do with the search engines that I can't see because I'm not running your business. Perhaps you will save money on hosting and maintenance, and nothing is unfixable, you can always rebuild trust, build links back up again and re rank your pages for the terms that you are trying to appear for. You will loose time on it though.

A note on local relevance

There is an additional note I must mention, which is that a www.somthing.de site will be seen as having more relevance when searched for within a German search engine such as www.google.de , so on and so forth.