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    4. PDFs and images in Sub folder or subdomain?

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    PDFs and images in Sub folder or subdomain?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • Bio-RadAbs
      Bio-RadAbs last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Matt-Williamson
        Matt-Williamson last edited by

        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..

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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