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
-
Meta refresh for news site?
We have a news site that uses a meta refresh (<meta < span="">http-equiv="refresh" content="600" /> across all content. I understand the reasoning on the homepage and am trying to decide of the cons of using this (slows page, is it treated differently and loses pagerank/link ..) Does anyone have experience with meta refresh being a negative thing or does it no longer matter?</meta <>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristieWahlquist0 -
Why has my site dropped off the face of Google???
Hi All, My site was ranking well for a long time and suddenly can't be seen at all any more. I have been trying to figure this out for some time and can't get to the bottom of it. Funny thing is also even when searching for my site with a keyword "snowboard gulmarg" my URL www.klinehinmalaya.com does not appear and somewhere way back in the listing my another page www.klinehimalaya.com/packages.php comes up. Any help would be good right now. Thanks in advance, Catherine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | caherinechan0 -
Why do some sites have several types of sitemap?
Hello Mozzers, I often seem to work on websites with several types of sitemaps - e.g. an html sitemap - an xml sitemap - almost always with identical structure and content. Does anybody know the thinking behind this? Currently looking at site with php and xml sitemap sitting alongside one another. I'm guessing one is for site users to read (and also to aid indexing) and the other for search engines, to further aid indexing. Does Google have any preferences? Is there anything you should be wary of re: Google, if there are multiple sitemaps?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Site Navigation
Hi Mozzers, I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav. Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are: 1. Category ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden 2. Subcat ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath 3. Family ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them. Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts? Thanks! -Zack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Things to remember when relaunching a site
We're about to re-launch our site but to think of everything before going live in a week is pretty tough going. Any suggestions or reminders as to what to remember and take care of before going live? What have you found or forgotten in your experience with re-launches? Thanks, Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Is my site being penalized?
I launched http://rumma.ge in February of this year. Because I'm using a domain hack (the Georgian domain), I'd really like to rank for just the word "rummage". After launching, I was steady at around page 4/5 on searches for "rummage". However since then I've tumbled out of the first 100. In fact I can't even find the site in the first 20 pages on Google for that search. Even a search for my exact homepage title text doesn't bring up the site, despite the fact that the site is still in the index. I'm wondering if one of the following could be the root cause: We have a ccTLD (.ge)--not sure about the impacts of this, but seems like it might not be the root cause because we were ranking for "rummage" when we first launched. Tried running an Adwords campaign but the site was flagged as a "bridge page" (working on getting this addressed). I'm wondering if this could have carryover impacts into natural search rankings? We've tried doing some press and built up a decent number of backlinks over the past couple of months, many of which had "rummage" in the anchor text. This was all organic, but happened over the span of a month which may be too fast? Am I being penalized? Beyond checking indexing of the site, is there a way to tell if I've been flagged for some bad behavior? Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm really confused by this since I feel like I've been doing things right and my rankings have been travelling downward. Thanks!! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | minouye0 -
What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?
I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Badges For a B2b site
love this seo tactic but it seems hard to get people to adopt it Has anyone seen a successful badge campaign for a b2b site? please provide examples if you can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0