Subdomains & CDNs

[ahirai]

I've set up a CDN to speed up my domain. I've set up a CNAME to map the subdomain cdn.example.com to the URL where the CDN hosts my static content (images, CSS and JS files, and PDFs).

www.example.com and cdn.example.com are now two different IP addresses.

Internal links to my PDF files (white papers and articles) used to be www.example.com/downloads but now they are cdn.example.com/downloads

The same PDF files can be accessed at both the www and the cdn. subdomain. Thus, external links to the www version will continue to work.

Question 1: Should I set up 301 redirects in .htaccess such as:

Redirect permanent /downloads/filename.pdf http://cdn.example.com/downloads/filename.pdf

Question 2: Do I need to do anything else in my .htaccess file (or anywhere else) to ensure that any SEO benefit provided by the PDF files remains associated with my domain?

Question 3: Am I better off keeping my PDF files on the www side and off of the CDN?

Thanks,

Akira

[NakulGoyal]

How many PDF files are we talking ? Are they indexed ? Is there unique text content or images that have text that google has OCR'D ? If yes, I would suggest keeping them on www and therefore keep it simple. Again, it depends how many PDF files in number as well as their size in gigs would make it an easy answer.

[ahirai]

There are about a dozen PDFs and they are indexed.

I agree that it's probably better to play it safe and keep these files on www.

Thanks!

[NakulGoyal]

Yup...keep it simple...where possible

[imfkhan]

On your cdn, you have an option to disallow se's to index files on subdomains by robots.txt so you can keep a copy on cdn.example.com as well, and noindex it via robots.txt for better  user experience