Subdomains & CDNs
-
I've set up a CDN to speed up my domain. I've set up a CNAME to map the subdomain cdn.example.com to the URL where the CDN hosts my static content (images, CSS and JS files, and PDFs).
www.example.com and cdn.example.com are now two different IP addresses.
Internal links to my PDF files (white papers and articles) used to be www.example.com/downloads but now they are cdn.example.com/downloads
The same PDF files can be accessed at both the www and the cdn. subdomain. Thus, external links to the www version will continue to work.
Question 1: Should I set up 301 redirects in .htaccess such as:
Redirect permanent /downloads/filename.pdf http://cdn.example.com/downloads/filename.pdf
Question 2: Do I need to do anything else in my .htaccess file (or anywhere else) to ensure that any SEO benefit provided by the PDF files remains associated with my domain?
Question 3: Am I better off keeping my PDF files on the www side and off of the CDN?
Thanks,
Akira
-
On your cdn, you have an option to disallow se's to index files on subdomains by robots.txt so you can keep a copy on cdn.example.com as well, and noindex it via robots.txt for better user experience
-
Yup...keep it simple...where possible
-
There are about a dozen PDFs and they are indexed.
I agree that it's probably better to play it safe and keep these files on www.
Thanks!
-
How many PDF files are we talking ? Are they indexed ? Is there unique text content or images that have text that google has OCR'D ? If yes, I would suggest keeping them on www and therefore keep it simple. Again, it depends how many PDF files in number as well as their size in gigs would make it an easy answer.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changing URL structure of site, including AMP - redirect AMP too?
So, I'm changing all the URLs of a site, including all its AMP URLs, I'll be redirecting all the normal URLs, but do I need to also redirect all the AMP pages?
Technical SEO | | alksfjasldfu934341 -
Moving a subdomain to subfolder with CNAME
Hi all, We have our docs in a subdomain on GitHub and looking to move it into a subfolder. Github offers the ability to redirect via CNAME https://gitbookio.gitbooks.io/documentation/platform/domains.html I am getting conflicting information on if this will work or cause duplicate content and hurt our SEO.
Technical SEO | | kate.hassey0 -
Subdomain question
Hi guys, I have a subdomain on my site that i want to completely remove from the index. I tried already everything to remove it but it is special situation so the only choice i have left is to remove it from Search Console in "Remove URLs" feature. So my question is: if i remove my root subdomain (example: http://subdomain.mydomain.com/) via "Remove URLs" feature in Webmaster Console, will it remove all the URLs coming from that particular domain as well? I also want to make sure that my root domain will stay untouched and be functioning normally. Thank you for advice!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Fetching & Rendering a non ranking page in GWT to look for issues
Hi I have a clients nicely optimised webpage not ranking for its target keyword so just did a fetch & render in GWT to look for probs and could only do a partial fetch with the below robots.text related messages: Googlebot couldn't get all resources for this page Some boiler plate js plugins not found & some js comments reply blocked by robots (file below): User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ As far as i understand it the above is how it should be but just posting here to ask if anyone can confirm whether this could be causing any prrobs or not so i can rule it out or not. Pages targeting other more competitive keywords are ranking well and are almost identically optimised so cant think why this one is not ranking. Does fetch and render get Google to re-crawl the page ? so if i do this then press submit to index should know within a few days if still problem or not ? All Best Dan0 -
Subdomain question for law firm in Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico.
Hi Gang, Our law firm has offices in the states of Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico. Each state is governed by unique laws, and each state has its own "flavor," etc. We currently are set up with the main site as: http://www.2keller.com (Indiana) Subdomains as: http://michigan.2keller.com (Michigan) http://newmexico.2keller.com (New Mexico) My client questions this strategy from time to time, and I want to see if anyone can offer some reassurance of which I haven't thought. Our reason for setting up the sites in this manner is to ensure that each site speaks to state-specific practice areas (for instance, New Mexico does nursing home abuse, whereas the other states don't, etc.) and state-specific ethics law (for instance, in some states you can advertise your dollar amount recoveries, and others you can't.) There are so many differences between each state that the content would seem to warrant it. Local citations and listings are another reason these sites are set up in such a fashion. The firm is a member of several local state directories and memberships, and by having these links go directly to the subdomain they reference, I can see this being another advantage. Also, inside each state there are separate pages set up for specific cities. We geo-target major cities in each state, and trying to do all of this under one domain for 3 different states would seemingly get very confusing, very quickly. I had thought of setting up the various state pages through folders on the main domain, but again, there is too much state specific info to make this seem like a logical approach. Granted the linking and content creation would be easier for one site, but I don't think we can accomplish this in a clean way with the offices being in such different locales? I guess I'm wondering if there are some things I'm overlooking here? Thanks guys/gals!
Technical SEO | | puck991 -
Cloudflare Email Address Protecting & SEO
I have a client who uses Cloudflare to protect their email address on their website from spam and when I crawl their site looking for errors it causes it to report multiple broken links on each page. Does anyone know how this impacts SEO? Should I recommend removing Cloudflare?
Technical SEO | | farlandlee0 -
Can subdomains boost the main domain?
HI I know that having a strong domain can help when creating sub domains, but can it also work the other way round? Can having a number of strong sub domains help the top level domain's quality and history? My reason for asking is that I have half a dozen domains which have been used for various projects, and still are, which have involved having a landing page on the root domain and running dozens of sub domains. These subdomains, across 6 root domains, have about 500,000 pages indexed. I have now decided I should do something with the root domain so am wondering if there are any benefits I would have gained from my initial approach. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
What are the SEO related negative aspects of having a blog on a subdomain?
Just double checking this one. Is it less than ideal to have a blog on a subdomain rather than as a sub folder on a domain?
Technical SEO | | PerchDigital0