PDF on financial site that duplicates ~50% of site content
-
I have a financial advisor client who has a downloadable PDF on his site that contains about 9 pages of good info. Problem is much of the content can also be found on individual pages of his site.
Is it best to noindex/follow the pdf? It would be great to let the few pages of original content be crawlable, but I'm concerned about the duplicate content aspect.
Thanks --
-
This is what we have done with pdfs. Assign rel="canonical" in .htaccess.
We did this with a few hundred files and it took google a LONG time to find and credit them.
-
You could set the header to noindex rather than rel=canonical
-
Personally I think it would be better not to index, it but if necessary, the index folder root seems like a good option
-
Thanks. Anybody want to weigh in on where to rel=canonical to? Home page?
-
If you are using apache, you should put it on your .htaccess with this form
<filesmatch “my-file.pdf”="">Header set Link ‘<http: misite="" my-file.html="">; rel=”canonical”‘</http:></filesmatch>
-
I think the right way here is to put the rel canonical in PDF header http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html
-
I thought the idea was to put rel=canonical on the duplicated page, to signal that "hey, this page may look like duplicate content, but please refer to this canonical URL"?
Looks like there is a pdf option for rel=canonical, I guess the question is, what page on the site to make canonical?
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Indicate the canonical version of a URL by responding with the
Link rel="canonical"
HTTP header. Addingrel="canonical"
to thehead
section of a page is useful for HTML content, but it can't be used for PDFs and other file types indexed by Google Web Search. In these cases you can indicate a canonical URL by responding with theLink rel="canonical"
HTTP header, like this (note that to use this option, you'll need to be able to configure your server):Link: <http: www.example.com="" downloads="" white-paper.pdf="">; rel="canonical"</http:>
-
Hi Keith,
I'm sorry, I should have clarified. The rel=canonical tags would be on your Web pages, not the PDF (they are irrelevant in a PDF document). Then Google will attribute your Web page as the original source of the content and will understand that the PDF just contains bits of content from those pages. In this instance I would include a rel=canonical tag on every page of your site, just to cover your bases. Hope that helps!
Dana
-
Not sure which page I would mark as being canonical, since the pdf contains content from several different pages on the site. I don't think it's possible to assign different rel=canonical tags to separate portions of a pdf, is it?
-
As long as you have rel=canonical tags properly in place, you don't need to worry about the PDF causing duplicate content problems. That way, any original content should be picked up and any duplicate can be attributed to your existing Web pages. Hope that's helpful!
Dana
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
-
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
Lot of duplicate content and still traffic is increasing... how does it work?
Hello Mozzers, I've a dilemma with a client's site I am working on that is make me questioning my SEO knowledge, or the way Google treat duplicate content. I'll explain now. The situation is the following: organic traffic is constantly increasing since last September, in every section of the site (home page, categories and product pages) even though: they have tons of duplicate content from same content in old and new URLs (which are in two different languages, even if the actual content on the page is in the same language in both of the URL versions) indexation is completely left to Google decision (no robots file, no sitemap, no meta robots in code, no use of canonical, no redirect applied to any of the old URLs, etc) a lot (really, a lot) of URLs with query parameters (which brings to more duplicated content) linked from the inner page of the site (and indexed in some case) they have Analytics but don't use Webmaster Tools Now... they expect me to help them increase even more the traffic they're getting, and I'll go first on "regular" onpage optimization, as their title, meta description and headers are not optimized at all according to the page content, but after that I was thinking on fixing the issues with indexation and content duplication, but I am worried I can "break the toy", as things are going well for them. Should I be confident that fixing these issues will bring to even better results or do you think is better for me to focus on other kind of improvements? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Guybrush_Threepw00d0 -
Spammy sites that link to a site
Hello, What is the best and quickest way to identify spammy sites that link to a website, and then remove them ( google disavow?) Thank you dear Moz, community - I appreciate your help 🙂 Sincerely, Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
How should I manage duplicate content caused by a guided navigation for my e-commerce site?
I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FireMountainGems0 -
Duplicate content on the same page--is this an issue?
We are transitioning to responsive design and some of our pages will not scale properly, so we were thinking of adding the same content twice to the same URL (one would be simple text -- for mobile and the other would include the images, etc for the desktop version), and content would change based on size of the screen. I'm not looking for another technical solution (I know google specifies that you can dynamically serve different content based on user agent)--I am wondering if any one knows if having the same exact content appear twice on the same URL will cause a problem with SEO (any historical tests or experience would be great). Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0