Do subdomains increase the main domain's popularity?

I know this is a basic question, I hope you don't mind me asking

For example, if I throw in a couple of subdomains like forum.tolmach.com and news.tolmach.com, which hypothetically could attract more visitors, will that impact the popularity of the main domain tolmach.com, given that it will not receive any incoming traffic from the new subdomains??

Thanks in advance for your ideas and a great 2006 to everyone!
Vlad

well subdomains are good to keep certain data on different urls as to speak, have a forum.subdomain is a good start. but having to many like news.subdomain may be abit of a hassle

Originally Posted by chester well subdomains are good to keep certain data on different urls

I very well understand the convenience of keeping certain data on separate domains, but what about popularity? will the subdomain's traffic increase the popularity (positioning in the search engines results) of the top domain??

Not to sure to be honest, pretty sure it will if it links to the normal domain though.

To some extent I would say yes, you get a boost in most search engine algorithms when you use your important keywords in your domain name. But if you're targeting ten or twelve keywords, they're hard to put into a single name. In this case Subdomains give you more opportunity to include keywords with your domain.

I think subdomains enhance your SEO, they act as other keywords right?

I think that they will indeed increase the views because they include more specific keywords to search for.

Also, subdomains viewed by other people believe that the original domain hosting the subdomain must be pretty popular to have other people using the same host with the subdomain...if that makes any sense at all...

I couldn't really say.

Surely if you were to slap some content at "whatever.domain.com", plastered with links to "domain.com" (your main domain), the search engine would be smart enough to realise they are part of the main domain, and not consider those links when tweaking your search engine ranking (or at least not value them as much as links from completely different domains)?

On the other hard, they may be recognised as keywords, so I imagine they can't do any harm.

I personally think it doesn't help, but not too sure. Very good question!

Originally Posted by Robson I think subdomains enhance your SEO, they act as other keywords right?

Good thinking, that is very true if you think. But i dont really like the fact of sharing my domain with other people unless it would be a hosting company (if you mean like yousite.hostingcompany.com. The only thing i'd use subdomains for would be something like forums. Which is like you kinda said.