its a small lead gen business and yes people always call for appointments, even on our site they rarely use the form. 80% are calls - but my question is does google penalizes for that type of practice?

Is it best practice to have phone numbers in the meta titles? Will google penalize for that? It is actually useful for the users...

I agree with you and thank you for your answer but at the same time i am more worried abt the structural standpoint - as i responded above to one of the replies - use the example with the hospital

A hospital may target very general related keywords but then it may offer very specific services and programs that are all indirectly related. Now those programs are very niche related and specific for certain types of surgeries and services offered, they contain a lot of information and can be expanded way above the 10 pages mentioned.

Now the question is what do you do in that case? You'd rather have 5 sub folders divided in other 20-30 categories and subcategories? Or you would rather have them structured in a better way on a sub-domain? What would be your choice in this case?

ok the main website targets 5 very competitive niches. They are different niches and they all offer different types of services.

as a good example would be a hospital that offers a couple of different programs and surgeries. Each program offers a different service, and targets different niche related keywords. But because the main site offers all of those its hard to categorize them in subfolders.

Ok so my understanding is that if you don't mind doing the extra work for a sub-domain then you do recommended it being used. Do you see sub-domains as achieving better placements down the road if the necessary extra work will be put into these?

how about from a category standpoint - on the main site if you are creating a subfolder you are limited to how deep u structure your categories as opposed to a subdomain you have more flexibility and are able to categorize those 100 pages much cleaner and user friendly

how about if you target a different geo location? wouldnt that be optimized better with a subdomain?

I wanted to know how efficient using a subdomain is, taking in consideration all the updates Google has made lately.

I am looking to use a subdomain for a well branded website for a niche specific part of their website. The subdomain will end-up having more than 100 pages.

I'd like to see in what cases do you guys recommend using a subdomain? How to get the same benefit out of a subdomain as i am getting from the actual main domain?