Support docs on a separate site?
-
Hello,
A client has a large ecommerce site (www.mydomain.com) for technical products that require a number of technical documents. Most of these are PDFs, some 3D PDFs drawings and renderings - all good for indexing. We are considering 2 possibilities for these:
1 - a separate site (www.mydomain2.com or docs.mydomain.com), catalog style (probably wordpress) to store the files, with links from product pages at (www.mydomain.com) to the relevant PDFs. This will be much easier to maintain than the second possibility.
2 - storing the files at www.mydomain.com (in /docs/ folder, for example) with links from the product pages to the relevant PDFs.
Is there an advantage one way or the other?
Thank you
-
1. The bonus of a subdomain is its still sort of linked to your site and can be easier to treat separate (organize) but the con is it doesn't really help boost your main domain
2. having it on your main domain e.g. /docs can help boost your main site (if people link to PDFs etc.) but can obviously increase site size (and sometimes load speeds) and can get a bit messy with orgnaising.
End of the day it comes down to your preference and whats easier for the user there are pros & cons for both personally I tend to lean toward having it on your main domain just to increase its authority and value to users (and thus Google).
Good luck.
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
-
Links from a penalised site.
Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Linking from a corporate site to a brand site.
Is there an SEO impact to a large corporation linking from a corporate and/or a divisional site to a specific brand site with it's own top level domain? We would like to keep the traffic coming, but not if it will be seen as a black hat tactic. My guess is that Google will be smart enough to see that the corporation owns the brand and at least not penalize us, but I am wondering if anyone else has this experience? Google Analytics is calling it self-referral.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrbobland0 -
Site redesign..have I done everything?
Hello, We have a site that was recently put through the redesign process-a couple of weeks ago. It was a tired site that was optimized well, but still struggled because it was so outdated. I went ahead and re-optimized, submitted a new sitemap, and did the fetch. Have I missed a step? Could someone offer insight into what they do when a site is redesigned and the steps taken to make sure that Google crawls and "appreciates" 🙂 the new site as soon as possible? Thanks in advance for any and all help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Because Goolge chose this link to my site?
I'm better ranked in Google for that link (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/paginas/ensaios.html) and not in (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/), you know you explain why? In all keywords, except that (luxury escorts in Rio de Janeiro) Sorry my english, I'm from Brazil and I'm using Google translator.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMaster0210 -
Should I link my similar sites together?
Hi I currently have two sites within exactly the same market. I've just purchased a third website from someone. Should I link these sites together? (i.e. in the page header should I cross link them or point two of them to the third?) If I do this will it harm them if they are on the same C-Class IP blocks? Is using private domains and different hosting companies considered dodgey in any way? Basically I'm a big wimp and don't want to do anything potentially that might potentially hurt my rankings;)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish0 -
Critique My Site For SEO
Hi Everyone, I was wondering if someone might critique my site and let me know what you think. I've done pretty much everything I know to do proper seo for my site. I'd love to hear some critiques about what I am doing wrong. I'm not sure if my titles are okay, being that they are similar amongst pages. The other thing is that for all the javascript buttons on the top I have no followed them since they don't have any anchor text. The way google will crawl my page is through the links in the footer. I was thinking of moving them throughout the body of the page since I hear google isn't giving as much weight to footer links. I also wanted to hear what you think about putting a blog on my site and updating with fresh content as opposed to creating a separate blog and then linking back to my website with anchor text. Thanks for all the help. And glad to be a member Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wsh150