Is having all your media hosted on a sub-domain bad?

[DownPour]

I just realized yesterday while doing some audit work on our site (which is still relatively new) that all of our audio assets are stored on a separate sub-domain.

We are an eCommerce site that sells audio books, and every product page has a sample audio file to listen to.  But all those files are stored on a sub-domain of the main site.  "cdn-media.oursite.com".

First, I understand that media(our audio files) has some inherent SEO value if hosted correctly.  Is that true?  And if so, how important would you think it is?

Secondly, assuming that it does have value, are we losing that value by having them hosted on a sub-domain?  I have read things that say sub-domains are bad, and I have read things that say that Google at least has been treating sub-domains as sub-folders, but I can't find anything definitive one way or the other.

On another note, another thing I saw is that people are linking to the sound files directly in various places, and those links are going to the sub-domain, not the main domain.  There aren't even pages on the sub-domain, just the files, so those links deliver a "visitor" to a page that is completely blank except for a tiny little audio player.  Not sure what to do about that, but that can't be good one way or the other right?

How big of a problem is this really?  Is it worth me going to our IT dept. and trying to change it?  It sounds like it would be a pretty big deal to change, so I'll need a few voices to back me up if that's the case.

[Everett]

CDN stands for "content delivery network" and it is very common practice to host media files in this way.

One thing you can look into is redirecting the sound file URL to the page on which the file is used (i.e. the product page), which would take care of the link equity loss you are concerned with. However, you will want to test that this doesn't break the way the file plays/displays on the product page.

It is not a "big" problem, but one solution I have recommended before is to set up the CDN as a sub-directory instead of a sub-domain. Depending on how much control you have over the DNS settings it can be doable. This would mean that the server hosting www.yourdomain.com/cdn-media/ would be different than the server hosting the rest of the site. That being said, this is something that could be a royal pain in the rear for your IT department, could cost a lot of money to implement, and may not even be possible in your particular situation. Choose your battles wisely.

One metric I'd want to see would be how many links outside of your domain are going into the CND domain.

I'm curious to see how others handle this situation so I'll leave this as a discussion for now. I hope you get some helpful answers!

[DownPour]

Thanks for the reply it's much appreciated!

yes, looking at the battle map now...may have to find another way...

I am also curious how others handle this.

[Everett]

Honestly, most people just ignore it. But I'll leave the discussion open for awhile in case someone has some other solution/s to the issue and found them worth pursuing.