Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My company has been around for several years now and hasn't really paid much mind to SEO or search engine rankings, so now I'm an in-house marketer with moderate SEO knowledge. We're setting up an article site with our help pages and blog under a subdomain so our writers can easily post articles without having to go through developers every time, as our root domain was set up with a custom in-house CMS. Is it possible for me to run a successful SEO campaign for our article site subdomain? I get that the root domain wouldn't benefit from any SEO authority the new site obtains, but my hands are tied.

We create cobranded websites for local businesses in many towns throughout the United States, always under a subdomain of our main site (e.g., afcreditunion.teachbanzai.com). Does this hurt our SEO rankings? We have a very specific reason for creating these microsites, because it's a high selling point. I've read and watched the material here on Moz regarding subdomains and subfolders, but it doesn't quite answer my question: since we create all these microsites not with the intent of passing authority to our website but with the intent of making their microsite have their branding.