Optimisation of Subdomain

[Fairyglass]

We have a retail website, with a wholesale website as a subdomain. While the two sites offer similar products, the wholesale site is a cut down version as of course we only wholesale our own products- the retail site offers products from many suppliers.

I've not done much SEO at all on the subdomain but would like to start working on it, but before I put a load of effort in can anyone advise if search engines will bother listing it at all, given that it's a subdomain with broadly similar stock? We also have a separate top level domain name available, would it be better relaunching it there and optimising as a separate website?

Thanks in advance for your views!
Ben

[Mike Hughes]

Personally I doubt if it will make much difference. Subdomains are mostly treated the same as unique domains.

There are pros to doing it on a unique domain though but it does take more work. The main one would be less need to brand the website (?). So you can name the domain 'wholesale-decorative-glass' and gain some positions that way.

Mike

[Fairyglass]

Thanks for your response Mike, and sorry for my late reply. That's useful information- I'd assumed, wrongly it seems, that a subdomain would not rank as highly as a unique domain. As I'm in a niche market I think we can probably optimise the current site to achieve the same positioning as we would by changing to a unique domain so will work on that basis.
Best wishes,
Ben