Site Architecture for Sub-Brands

[Alaniz]

I am working on launching a few industry specific sub-brands for our marketing agency and am trying to figure out the best way to deliver a tailored user experience using subfolders instead of subdomains, if this is indeed the best option...

Since I am trying to provide separate experiences, I looking at housing microsites in sub-folders - say /technology or /medical.  Each with its own navigation, home page, and industry specific content/blog/portfolio.  A couple things I am considering:

Will my microsite "home pages" and site pages rank as well in a sub-folder versus if they were actually the primary pages on their own sub-domain?

Will separate Wordpress and theme installs and separate primary navigations have any affect on SEO if they are in sub-folders of the same site?

Thanks in advance for any input.  I really appreciate it!

[JaneCopland]

Hosting these pages as subfolders instead of subdomains should be fine, and is the "traditional" way of presenting new content with the highest likelihood that the content will inherit authority from its parent domain from an SEO point of view. They should rank just as well as if they were on subdomains or separate domains.

Separate installations and themes should not make a difference; Google will be absolutely clear in its understanding that these sub-brands are related to the main brand and to each other, so assuming you are fine with this, different design and CMS installations will not make a difference.