Hi Ryan,

Your question is quite interesting. I, myself, went through the article one more time. I have no facts to back up the following, but I hope that it will contribute. FIrst I would go and validate them on webmaster tools. If they are inteded to hit a certain market, I will select that geographical location. Also, I think you have litte to worry about. I imagine that google won't pass certain trust to subdomains, depending on the site. If the number of subdomains is considerable, I would say that they have pretty slim chances of getting some push from the main site. Take for example free webhosting services. They could rank and have decent page rank, if people show interest to the particular subdomain, but is highly unlikely taht to be caused by the authority of the main site.

I haven't seen free hosting subdomain rank well for a long time now. On the other hand you have student and academic accounts on university sites. They all go with subfolders and rank pretty well for highly specific topics. If I have to give a short answer, I would say that is the type of site that makes the difference for google. If your site is considers a casual business website and you are developing a new market then you might not have a problem. If you use sudbomains for specifying product, then you might be ok again.

Google use subdomain for all their major products. For Google pages they used a separate domain. They now redirects to a subdomain sites.google.com. However, they will never give subdomains for personal use. There might be something to that. They do a 301 redirect from a subdomain on googlepages.com to sites.google.com/site/. So what they offer is a 301 redirect to a sub-sub folder, located on a subdomain on Google.