I'm curious if you guys know if subdomains are treated equally compared to normal domain names. For example would a website named car-quote.information.com rank as well as car-quote-information.com assuming they had the exact same content, coding, and etc?

No effect on rankings.

Shouldn't make a difference though one thing to keep in mind is that the subdomain will be seen as a completely different domain than the main domain. So car-quote.information.com and information.com will not be seen as part of the same domain, but 2 completely separate domain.

You may want to consider that if you want your entire site to be considered as one domain. If you're just looking to get keywords into the url you can do that by naming youf files and folders with keywords:

information.com/car-quote/

Thanks for the responses guys, they are really helpful!

I actually just wanted to host websites on one domain to avoid the cost of registering possibly hundreds of domains. I was aware of the keyword in the folder trick before.

Thanks for the expalnation, vangogh. I noticed that too: my main site has a high pagerank, while the lesser known subdomains have lower page rank.

It helps with SEO if you use the right type of script. But I agree with the general concensus...by itself, subdom doesn't have much of an effect.