PDFs and images in Sub folder or subdomain?

[Bio-RadAbs]

What would you recommend as best practice? Our ecommerce site has a lot of PDFs supporting the product page. Currently they are kept in a sub domain and so are all images.

Would it be better to keep them all in a subfolder? I've read about blogs being hosted on a subfolder to be better than subdomain but what about pdfs and images?

thoughts?

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi I personally would host them in a subfolder - especially the PDFs as they are likely to gain links and these links will help strengthen your domain.

However if you have them in a sub-domain they won't have the same benefit from the links as Google essentially treats sub-domains as a separate domain. This will also limit the ranking ability of PDFs as they won't benefit from your domains authority on a sub-domain.

Have a look at this article for a bit more insight into subfolder vs sub-domain

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

I hope this helped..