Support docs on a separate site?

[tlw]

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

[GPainter]

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.