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
-
Short description about our search results drop + forum moving to subdomain question.
Hello, here is our story. Our niche is mental health (psychology, psychotherapy e.t.c). Our portal has thousand of genuine articles, news section about mental health, researches, job findings for specialists, a specialized bookstore only with psychology books, the best forum in country, we thousands of active members and selfhelp topics etc. In our country (non english), our portal has been established in 2003. Since then, for more than 15 years, we were no 1 in our country, meaning that we had the best brand name, hundreds of external authors writing unique content for our portal and hundreds of no1 keywords in google search results. Actually, we had according to webmaster tools, more than 1.000 keywords, in 1 and 2 position. (we were ranking no1 in all the best keywords). Before 2 years, we purchased the best domain in our niche. I ll use the below example (of course, domains are not the real ones):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dodoni
We had: e-pizza.com and now we have: pizza.com
We did the appropriate redirects but from day one, we had around 20-30% drop in search engines. After 6 months -which is something that google officialy mentions, we lost all "credits from the old domain.. .and at that point, we had another 20-30% drop in search results. Further more, in any google core update, we were keep dropping. Especially in last May (coronovirus update), we had another huge drop. We do follow seo guides, we have a dedicated server, good load speed, well structured data, amp, a great presence in social media, with more than 130.000 followers, etc. According to our investigation, we came to one only conclusion: that our forum, kills our seo (of course, noone in our team can guarantee that this is the actual reason of the uge drop in may-in coronovirus google core update). We believe that the forum kills our seo, because it produces low quality posts by members. For example, psychopharmacology in a very active sections and we believe, google is very "sensitive" in these kind of posts and information. So here is the question: although the forum is very very active, with thousands of new topics and posts every month, we are thinking of moving it to a subdomain, from the subfolder that now is.
This will help our domain authority to increase from 38 that is stuck 2 years now, to larger scales. We believe that althougth this forum gave a great boost to the portal, in the past 10-15 years, it somehow makes a negative impact now. If I could give more spesific details, I d say this: in all seo tools we run, the best kewwords bringing visitors to us, arent anymore, psychology and psychotherapy and mental health and this kind of top-keywords, but are mostly the ones from the forum, like: I want to proceed with a suicide, I m taking efexor or xanax and they have side effects, why i gain wieght with the antidepressants I get etc. 1. Moving our forum to subdomain, will be some kind of pain, since it is a large community, with thousands of backlinks that we somehow must handle in a proper way, also with a mobile application, things that will have to change and probably have some kind of negative impact. Would that be according to your knowledge a correct move and our E-A-T will benefit for google, or since google will know that the subdomain is still part of the same website/portal, it will handle it somehow, the same way as it does now? I have read hundreds of articles about forum in subdomains or in subfolders, but none of them covers a case stydy like ours, since most articles are talking about new forums and what is the best way to handle them and where is the best place to create them (in subfolder of subdomain) when from scratch. Looking forward to your answers.0 -
Can some sort of wildcard redirect be used on a single folder path?
We have a directory with thousands of pages and we are migrating the entire site to another root URL. These folder paths will not change on the new site, but we don't want to use a wildcard to redirect EVERYTHING to the same folder path on the new site. Setting up manual 301 redirects on this particular directory would be crazy. Is there a way to isolate something like a wildcard redirect to apply only to a specific folder? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Same Alt tag on the images
Can We have same alt tags on all the images? Below pages have images with same alt tag "astrologer Ravi sharma". I used name of the person on every image. before today, all images were shown in google images but today no image is there. any comment. Like - http://www.astrologerravisharma.com/astrologer-ravi-sharma-photos/ http://www.astrologerravisharma.com/gallery/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
URL structure for categories, sub categories and products
Hi, I'm looking for some advice about URL hierarchy and the best way to structure URLs for SEO with regards to categories, sub categories and product pages. The way the site is set up displays the URLs as such, example: 1. /badge-accessories/ 2. /badge-accessories/plastic-wallets/ 3. /badge-accessories/plastic-wallets/clear-flexible-wallets/ I am questioning whether it would be best to keep it like this (which the site developers are suggesting) or change to something like: 1. /badge-accessories/ 2. /plastic-wallets/ 3. /clear-plastic-flexible-wallets/ Or something like: 1. /badge-accessories/ 2. /plastic-wallets/ 3. /plastic-wallets/clear-flexible-wallets/ Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kerry_Jones0 -
How Many Images on 1 Page Are Acceptable
Example I have a page with a slideshow of 35 pictures. They are all unique pictures and relevant to the page, have unique alt text, though no captions or description surrounding the images. Page also has a lot of unique written content. Question: is this large nr of pictures potentially overwhelming for search engines and they may think it is spammy and it would be a safer bet to only keep the top 10 pictures on such page? I did review this great whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday - and I noticed this at very end: "The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result." My page has been indexed, but will ranking potentially be hurt and to play it safe I better reduce nr of pictures? I do understand the "do what is best for the user" scenario and that is what I am doing with a lot of amazing original pictures not found on any other website. However, with search engines we obviously have to consider how they operate as well. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Mobile Site - Same Content, Same subdomain, Different URL - Duplicate Content?
I'm trying to determine the best way to handle my mobile commerce site. I have a desktop version and a mobile version using a 3rd party product called CS-Cart. Let's say I have a product page. The URLs are... mobile:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon
store.domain.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog#products.view&product_id=857 desktop:
store.domain.com/two-toned-tee.html I've been trying to get information regarding how to handle mobile sites with different URLs in regards to duplicate content. However, most of these results have the assumption that the different URL means m.domain.com rather than the same subdomain with a different address. I am leaning towards using a canonical URL, if possible, on the mobile store pages. I see quite a few suggesting to not do this, but again, I believe it's because they assume we are just talking about m.domain.com vs www.domain.com. Any additional thoughts on this would be great!0 -
Mobile subdomain recommendations - Mobile SEO
My company is moving forward with creating a subdomain for mobile visitors (m.examplesite.com). I know there is much discussion on subdomain vs one url with different style sheets. That ship has sailed and the subdomain is the way we are proceeding. Google appears to recommend leaving both sites open to the normal Googlebot and redirecting the mobile bot to the mobile site (as we will be redirecting mobile visitors to the mobile subdomain). Has anyone had experience with this. Any duplicate content issues? Does anyone feel strongly that the normal Googlebot should be blocked from the mobile site (this seems to go against Google's recommendations)? It seems like another option is to use the canonical tag and let the search engines know the traditional site is the canonical page/version. Any recommendations? Any other issues that should be considered?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | btdavis0