Put document pages to the company site or create "docs" subdomain?

Question

The company produces several software products and the company's site has subdirs for each of the product:

• www.example.com/product1
• www.example.com/product2
• www.example.com/product3

which is handy and nice for SEO.

There are also some documents, howtos and help pages for each product. For some historical reasons these pages are located under docs subdir, like that

• www.example.com/docs

Now we discuss if we should create separate subdomain docs.site.com to keep help and documentation separated from main site. Not a big deal technically but may be painful as of SEO side.

What would you recommend, to keep products docs on the same site as products information itself or to create separate domain for docs? It is much easier to maintain separate domain (to make it fuzzy I can add that 'main' and 'docs' parts of the site uses different CMSes), we can also add HTTPS to it separately from main site, but we are afraid of SEO things.

Answer 1

What would you recommend, to keep products docs on the same site as products information itself or to create separate domain for docs?

I'm doing all on the same domain because of the easier organisation and for better user experience.

For example if you have 3 products in your company, it's better to have documentation linked on that products site (eg. www.site.com/product1/doc.pdf than www.anothersite.com/product1.pdf)

If you need bigger organization of documents, than put it like

www.site.com/docs/doc1.pdf etc.

But... there's a way with no follow and iframes.

Further reading: https://moz.com/blog/the-hidden-power-of-nofollow-links