Proper way to create and work with a subdomain?

My site got effected by Panda, and I am trying to see if making a subdomain would work.

The site is comehike.com, and I created a subdomain which is currently empty at hiking.comehike.com

I have a directory /outdoors that has some high quality hand-written articles. I want to put those into the new subdomain to see what would happen.

My questions are:

1) Should I just copy and paste the files for those pages into the new subdomain's folder, and just change all the links in all my pages from the original domian to the new subdomain?

2) Should I just do a 301 redirect to the new subdomain

3) Since test.sit开发者_JS百科e.com and www.site.com are diff domains, will the new page have to start from scratch in terms of page ranks, and its rankings in the serps?

Thanks!

I am not sure, if the sub domain is helpful but just try it.

Regarding the page rank: I can't see problem with that, because Google regards sub domains as a part of the main site but changing the site's structure could effect the page rank of course.

I have some experience with a 301 redirect, the search engines pick it up without any problems but can't say if it is affecting the page rank. I used .htaccess with error404.php for a redirect:

header('...'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

HTH