Search engines: Subdomains or folders, does it make a difference?

[chat111]

For example I have a domain name kitchenproducts.com, but I would like to concentrate on a niche "frying pans".

What would be better from the point of view of the search engine, to create "kitchenproducts.com/fryingpans/" or "fryingpans.kitchenproducts.com"? Does it make a difference? Cheers!

 

[TroyS]

Ranking wise it doesn't make any difference. A few years ago Google made a change where they treated subdomains mor elike folders to prevent people spamming forum results with different pages (using subdomains) across all results in the top 10.

In the example you used I would definitely use kitchenproducts.com/fryingpans/ as it makes more sense to the person browsing the site. The difference would be if your frypans site had a different look and feel to the rest of the site.