Hello,

I'm looking to launch a large multi site deployment and up to this point, I have been using subdomains for each of the local areas I cover, so something like this:

example1.thesite.com
example2.thesite.com

I have seemed to do well with this method in search. My main domain (thesite.com) has a decent pr of 5.

The company is now a larger launch in a lot more areas and I was curious if this is still the best method to use as I will have a very large number of subdomains to manage. If I didn't use our current method, I would be moving to something like www.thesite.com/example3 or www.thesite.com/state/example3

Any thoughts? I don't want to kill our best traffic generator in search.
I see pros and cons to each method.

Thanks