PDFs and images in Sub folder or subdomain?
-
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?
-
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..
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
-
Does a root domain get SEO power from its subdomains?
Hi there! I'd appreciate your help with the following case: a) Current 10-year-old website (community) on root domain "example.com" (250,000 incoming quality-backlinks) will move to the new subdomain "newsub.example.com" (301 redirects to the new subdomain for all current subfolders) b) A new website (shop) will launch on the root domain "example.com" Question: Will the new website on "example.com" get SEO power from the old website on "newsub.example.com"? SEO power = linkjuice/authority/trust/history/etc. from the 250,000 backlinks. What I'm trying to achieve: Maintain the built-up SEO power for the root domain "example.com" Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this! P.S. Plenty has been written about subdomains inheriting from their root domains (so please don't share input on the subdomain vs. subfolder debate). But I can't find satisfactory info about the other way around (root domains inheriting from their subdomains), e.g. if wikia.com gets SEO power from its subdomains superman.wikia.com, starwars.wikia.com, etc.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ebebeb0 -
Is there a problems with putting encoding into the subdomain of a URL?
We are looking at changing our URL structure for tracking various affiliates from: https://sub.domain.com/quote/?affiliate_id=xxx to https://aff_xxx_affname.domain.com/quote/ Both would allow us to track affiliates, but the second would allow us to use cookies to track. Does anyone know if this could possibly cause SEO concerns? Also, For the site we want to rank for, we will use a reverse proxy to change the URL from https://aff_xxx.maindomain.com/quote/ to https://www.maindomain.com/quote/ would that cause any SEO issues. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Invest in a Image Sitemap - Yes or No?
Hey Mozers, 2 part question I'm reaching out to see if you all think Image Sitemaps are totally worth it for a big company. I can totally understand its value for a smaller mom & pop company. With a larger company they would have way more products so is it worth it having an image site map? I cant find examples of image sitemaps online. Would you be able to provide a website that is doing it? I can only find video sitemaps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
E-commerce worldwide sub domains or folders
Hi Guys, We currently only sell to the UK so its pretty easy to manage our seo etc. However we are building a new site on Trespass.com and will be using magento enterprise. We will be serving the UK, US and the rest of the world. Does anyone here have experience with this? Is it best to have sub domains ie. UK.trespass.com, US.trespass.com? Or folders Trespass.com/uk Trespass.com/de Trespass.com/US Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trespass0 -
Moving popular blog from root to subdomain. Considerations & impact?
I'd like to move the popular company blog from /ecommerce-blog to blog.bigcommerce.com.WordPress application is currently living inside the application that runs the .com and is adding a large amount of files to the parent app, which results in longer deployment times than we'd like. We would use HTTP redirection to handle future requests (e.g. HTTP status code 301). How can this be handled from a WP point of view? What is the impact of SEO, rankings, links, authority? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fullstackmarketing.io0 -
What impact will new folder structure have?
I'm evaluating a request to restructure our existing folder structure for Ties.com and I would like some input. I typically recommend proper folder structure for ecommerce sites either when doing a new build or when doing an information architecture overhaul because of duplicate content or canonicalization issues. Ties.com doesn't have duplicate content or canonicalization issues so I'm really trying to get feedback about the SEO impact of a folder structure change versus the amount of time required on our side to do the work. Please share your experiences. Current URL structure example: http://www.ties.com/v/a/the-american-necktie-co-navy-and-gold-stripe-navy-blue-skinny-tie Potential New Structure: http://www.ties.com**/skinny-ties**/the-american-necktie-co-navy-and-gold-stripe-navy-blue-skinny-tie OR http://www.ties.com/skinny-ties/brand/product-title I'm well aware that as a BEST PRACTICE we should be using the category/subcategory folder structure, but since we aren't really suffering from any technical SEO issues then I don't know if this will be worth our time to remap all of these URL's via 301 and canonicalize everything. I anticipate it will be a lot of work and if the Return on Effort is low I can't prioritize this project. I need 2nd and 3rd opinions from experienced ecommerce retail SEO's. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ties.com0 -
Query / Discussion on Subdomain and Root domain passing authority etc
I've seen Rands video on subdomains and best pratices at
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites I have a question/theory though and it is related to an issue I am having. We have built our website, and now we are looking at adding 3rd party forums and blogs etc (all part of one CMS). The problem is these need to to be on a seperate subdomain to work correctly (I won't go into the specific IT details but this is what I have been advised by my IT guru's). So I can have something like:
http://cms.mysite.com/forum/ Obviously after reading Rands post and other stuff this is far from ideal. However I have another Idea - run the CMS from root and the main website from the www. subdomain. EG
www.mysite.com
mysite.com/blog Now my theory is that because so many website (possibly the majority - especially smaller sites) don't use 301 redirects between root and www. that search engines may make an exception in this case and treat them both as the same domain, so it could possibly be a way of getting round the issue. This is just a theory of mine, based solely on my thoughts that there are so many websites out there that don't 301 root to www. or vice versa, that possibly it would be in the SE's self interest to make an exception and count these as one domain, not 2. What are your thoughts on this and has there been any tests done to see if this is the case or not? Thanks0
