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
-
301 a whole subdomain to main domain
Hello, we have our website in two languages. The subdomain cs. for czech and main domain for english. Somehow this has caused google not to rank our main domain in local CZ SERP for many english keywords and we have not found out a reason other than it might think of them as duplicates or that we at the start had put targeting for the cs. domain to CZECH. (Its been 4 months, english keywords in Czech serp are easier and still it ranks them on the very last place, yet for example.com ranks them in google.com co.uk, fr etc in top 10) We will close our cs.example.com subdomain and use only example.com hoping this will not cause google to display only one domain and raise it in CZECH rankings. **Can i 301 redirect cs.example.com to example.com and all the categories of cs.example.com to relevant english categories. This should be ok? **
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Subdomain redirect
Hey guys, I was thinking about creating subdomains for one of my websites. I want to divide my website in different subdomains (blog.[site].com / directory.[site].com / etc.) but I'm afraid that this will negatively impact my rankings. My blog for example has a lot of supporting content for my products and services that are primarily hosted on the homepage. Have you guys ever created subdomains at a later stage of your website's existence? What kind of impact did you notice? Would you recommend it? Thanks a million!
Technical SEO | | Nizar.1 -
Images, CSS and Javascript on subdomain or external website
Hi guy's, I came across webshops that put images, CSS and Javascript on different websites or subdomains. Does this boost SEO results? On our Wordpress webshop all the sourcescodes are placed after our own domainname: www.ourdomainname.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.11.3'
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO
www.ourdomainname.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/example.jpg Examples of other website: Website 1:
https://www.zalando.nl/heren-home/ Sourcecode:
https://secure-i3.ztat.net//camp/03/d5/1a0168ac81f2ffb010803d108221.jpg
https://secure-media.ztat.net/media/cms/adproduct/ad-product.min.css?_=1447764579000 Website 2:
https://www.bol.com/nl/index.html Sourcecode:
https://s.s-bol.com/nl/static/css/main/webselfservice.1358897755.css
//s.s-bol.com/nl/upload/images/logos/bol-logo-500500.jpg Website 3:
http://www.wehkamp.nl/ Sourcecode:
https://static.wehkamp.nl/assets/styles/themes/wehkamp.color.min.css?v=f47bf1
http://assets.wehkamp.com/i/wehkamp/350-450-layer-SDD-wk51-v3.jpg0 -
Badges & SEO
Hello, Moz Community! We're working on creating an affiliate badge for events that make our best-of list and we're wondering: if every event website embedded the badge (could be as many as 70), would having the same image hosting URL for each one raise concerns with Google? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EveryActionHQ0 -
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 -
Temporary Redirects - Trackback & Feed
Under my MOZ account I'm getting a bunch of temporary redirect warnings. Most of them are blog post with a /feed or a /trackback . I know the trackback URL's are coming from blogs where people have commented because it brings up a Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed section. I'm not sure how to make this /trackback work. The only line of code in my editor that says trackback is h3#postinfo,
Technical SEO | | jampaper
h3#comments,
h3#respond,
h3#trackbacks,
#respond h3 {
margin: 0;
}0 -
WordPress & Page Numbers
Hi, I am working on a large WP site for a client and have an issue with duplicate content and page numbers. I am using the Yoast SEO plugin but can't seem to resolve the issue. Let me give an example: If I go to a popular category, for example F1, there are over 10 pages of content for the category and although the URL changes, the Title and Meta Description stay the same. Now...if I was using a template for the title and description I could add the page number variable, but as I am overwriting the template with SEO specific category information I can't use variables and hence the problem! This is such a common problem I know somebody will have an answer! Thanks
Technical SEO | | JonathanSmith0 -
Google Web Master Tools - Keyword Variants & misspelling
We have millions of urls and the technical expertise to write code to fix the spelling of keyword variants Google has discovered and shows us in Web Master tools. Since Google has recognized these as variants, is it worth our time to write code that will fix the spelling of obvious misses?
Technical SEO | | snoopcat0