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In answer to your question, Rand did a great article on this a while back as a follow on to a white board friday session.- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

There are also multiple other questions of a similar nature.

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sub+domain+vs.+subfolder

The general consensus seems to be sub-folder over sub-domain. As Sub Folders tend to get all the benefits from the root domain.

To quote Rand from the top article his advice:

"1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."

So both A and B - www.domain.com/keyword

Hope this helps.

I'm not using it, but my spammy spidey sense is tingling....

Banner Ads (which aren't ads because they are free?) on your blog linking to other peoples blogs and vice versa. Sounds risky.

Imagine one of those Ad spots is on the Blog Roll - 500 links from 1 domain to 1 page. Red flag.....

Sure

Go to your respective google, in the search box type:

site:domainname.com

This should give you a list of most indexed urls...not always right.

Also try checking out your Google Webmaster Tools Account (GWT), in the dashboard on the right hand side labelled sitemaps is a list of submitted and indexed urls.

Hope this helps.

Something tells me I know the answer to this question already but I'd always appreciate the advice of fellow professionals.

So.....fresh content is big now in Google, and i've seen some great examples of this. When launching a new product or unleashing (yes unleashing) a new blog post I see our content launches itself into the rankings for some fairly competitive terms. However after 1-2 weeks these newly claimed rankings begin to fade from the lime light.

So the question is, what do I need to do to retain these rankings?

We're active on social media tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing our content as well as working to create exciting and relevant content via external sources. So far all this seems to have do is slow the fall from grace.

Perhaps this is natural. But i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it is just keep up the hard work.

Agreed!

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm going to agree with the Noisey Little Monkey and Andy,

I answered a question similar to this a while back - check it out

The summary - Rand did a great article on this a while back- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unders...

There are also multiple other questions of a similar nature.

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/searc...

General consensus is be sub-folder over sub-domain.

Main reason - Sub Folders get the benefits from the root domain, Sub Domains don't.

Here's the key take away from Rands article:

"1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."

Hopefully this will have helped you make your mind up.

SEO Keith has pretty much hit it spot on.

I would try and use a combination of all 4 if at all possible.

From my observation GWT accuracy seems to vary dependent on how often your content is crawled..... showing a history of all your links i'm not sure it can be beaten. But accuracy of what is included I am unsure. We have a few external links that were pointing at our site which we know no longer exist. 3 months on they are still in our link profile according to GWT.