PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
-
Hello,
We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product.
We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful.
My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content?
Thanks.
-
Hey Bob
I think you should forget about any kind of perceived conventions and have whatever you think works best for your users and goals.
Again, look at unbounce, that is a custom landing page with a homepage link (to share the love) but not the general site navigation.
They also have a footer to do a bit more link love but really, do what works for you.
Forget conventions - do what works!
Hope that helps
Marcus -
I see, thanks! I think it's important not to have the ecommerce navigation on the page promoting the pdf. What would you say is ideal as far as the graphical and navigation components of the page with the PDF on it - what kind of navigation and graphical header should I have on it?
-
Yep, check the HTTP headers with webbug or there are a bunch of browser plugins that will let you see the headers for the document.
That said, I would push to drive the links to the page though rather than the document itself and just create a nice page that houses the document and make that the link target.
You could even make the PDF link only available by email once they have singed up or some such as canonical is only a directive and you would still be better getting those links flooding into a real page on the site.
You could even offer up some HTML to make this easier for folks to link to that linked to your main page. If you take a look at any savvy infographics etc folks will try to draw a link into a page rather than the image itself for the very same reasons.
If you look at something like the Noobs Guide to Online Marketing from Unbounce then you will see something like this as the suggested linking code:
[](<strong>http://unbounce.com/noob-guide-to-online-marketing-infographic/</strong>)
[](<strong>http://unbounce.com/noob-guide-to-online-marketing-infographic/</strong>)
[](<strong>http://unbounce.com/noob-guide-to-online-marketing-infographic/</strong>)
Unbounce – The DIY Landing Page Platform
So, the image is there but the link they are pimping is a standard page:
http://unbounce.com/noob-guide-to-online-marketing-infographic/
They also cheekily add an extra homepage link in as well with some keywords and the brand so if folks don't remove that they still get that benefit.
Ultimately, it means that when links flood into the site they benefit the whole site rather than just promote one PDF.
Just my tuppence!
Marcus -
Thanks for the code Marcus.
Actually, the pdf is what people will be linking to. It's a guide for websites. I think the PDF will be much easier to promote than the article.I assume so anyway.
Is there a way to make sure my canonical code in htaccess is working after I insert the code?
Thanks again,
Bob
-
Hey Bob
There is a much easier way to do this and simply have your PDFs that you don't want indexed in a folder that you block access to in robots.txt. This way you can just drop PDFs into articles and link to them knowing full well these pages will not be indexed.
Assuming you had a PDF called article.pdf in a folder called pdfs/ then the following would prevent indexation.
User-agent: * Disallow: /pdfs/
Or to just block the file itself:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /pdfs/yourfile.pdf Additionally, There is no reason not to add the canonical link as well and if you find people are linking directly to the PDF then having this would ensure that the equity associated with those links was correctly attributed to the parent page (always a good thing).Header add Link '<http: www.url.co.uk="" pdfs="" article.html="">; </http:> rel="canonical"'
Generally, there are better ways to block indexation than with robots.txt but in the case of PDFs, we really don't want these files indexed as they make for such poor landing pages (no navigation) and we certainly want to remove any competition or duplication between the page and the PDF so in this case, it makes for a quick, painless and suitable solution.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Thanks ThompsonPaul,
Say the pdf is located at
domain.com/pdfs/white-papers.pdf
and the article that I want to rank is at
domain.com/articles/article.html
do I simply add this to my htaccess file?:
Header add Link "<http: www.domain.com="" articles="" article.html="">; rel="canonical""</http:>
-
You can insert the canonical header link using your site's .htaccess file, Bob. I'm sure Hostgator provides access to the htaccess file through ftp (sometimes you have to turn on "show hidden files") or through the file manager built into your cPanel.
Check tip #2 in this recent SEOMoz blog article for specifics:
seomoz.org/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seosJust remember too - you will want to do the same kind of on-page optimization for the PDF as you do for regular pages.
- Give it a good, descriptive, keyword-appropriate, dash-separated file name. (essential for usability as well, since it will become the title of the icon when saved to someone's desktop)
- Fill out the metadata for the PDF, especially the Title and Description. In Acrobat it's under File -> Properties -> Description tab (to get the meta-description itself, you'll need to click on the Additional Metadata button)
I'd be tempted to build the links to the html page as much as possible as those will directly help ranking, unlike the PDF's inbound links which will have to pass their link juice through the canonical, assuming you're using it. Plus, the visitor will get a preview of the PDF's content and context from the rest of your site which which may increase trust and engender further engagement..
Your comment about links in the PDF got kind of muddled, but you'll definitely want to make certain there are good links and calls to action back to your website within the PDF - preferably on each page. Otherwise there's no clear "next step" for users reading the PDF back to a purchase on your site. Make sure to put Analytics tracking tags on these links so you can assess the value of traffic generated back from the PDF - otherwise the traffic will just appear as Direct in your Analytics.
Hope that all helps;
Paul
-
Can I just use htaccess?
See here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers
We only have one pdf like this right now and we plan to have no more than five.
Say the pdf is located at
domain.com/pdfs/white-papers.pdf
and the article that I want to rank is at
domain.com/articles/article.pdf
do I simply add this to my htaccess file?:
Header add Link "<http: www.domain.com="" articles="" article.pdf="">; rel="canonical""</http:>
-
How do I know if I can do an HTTP header request? I'm using shared hosting through hostgator.
-
PDF seem to not rank as well as other normal webpages. They still rank do not get me wrong, we have over 100 pdf pages that get traffic for us. The main version is really up to you, what do you want to show in the search results. I think it would be easier to rank for a normal webpage though. If you are doing a rel="canonical" it will pass most of the link juice, not all but most.
-
PDF seem to not rank as well as other normal webpages. They still rank do not get me wrong, we have over 100 pdf pages that get traffic for us. The main version is really up to you, what do you want to show in the search results. I think it would be easier to rank for a normal webpage though. If you are doing a rel="canonical" it will pass most of the link juice, not all but most.
-
Thank you DoRM,
I assume that the PDF is what I want to be the main version since that is what I'll be marketing, but I could be wrong? What if I get backlinks to both pages, will both sets of backlinks count?
-
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:>
Google currently supports these link header elements for Web Search only.
You can read more her http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
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
-
Does link position matter in the content/html code
My question is that if I have several links going to different landing pages will the one at the top of the content pass more value than ones at the bottom. Assuming that there are not more than 1 of the same link in the content. The ultimate question is whether or not link position in the content/html code make a difference if it passes more value. This question comes in response to this whiteboard Friday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAH762AqUTU Rand talks about how if there are 2 links going to the same URL from the same content page then google will only inherit the value of the anchor text from the first link on the page and not the both of them. Meaning that google will treat that second link as if it doesn’t exist. There are lots of resources that shows this was true but there isn’t much content newer than 2010 that say this is still true, We all know that things have changed a lot since then Does that make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 97th_Floor0 -
Internal link from blog content to commercial pages risks?
Hi guys, Has anyone seen cases where a site has been impacted negatively from internal linking from blog content to commercial based pages (e.g. category pages). Anchor text is natural and the links improve user experience (i.e it makes sense to add them, they're not forced). Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Duplicated Content with Index.php
Good Afternoon, My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage. I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandonEML0 -
Implications of posting duplicate blog content on external domains?
I've had a few questions around the blog content on our site. Some of our vendors and partners have expressed interest in posting some of that content on their domains. What are the implications if we were to post copies of our blog posts on other domains? Should this be avoided or are there circumstances that this type of program would make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visier1 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content
We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin). We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with. I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use. I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can PM further info if necessary. Thank you for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BethA0 -
Duplicate page content and duplicate pate title
Hi, i am running a global concept that operates with one webpage that has lot of content, the content is also available on different domains, but with in the same concept. I think i am getting bad ranking due to duplicate content, since some of the content is mirrored from the main page to the other "support pages" and they are almost 200 in total. Can i do some changes to work around this or am i just screwed 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smartmedia0 -
Google consolidating link juice on duplicate content pages
I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??0 -
BEING PROACTIVE ABOUT CONTENT DUPLICATION...
So we all know that duplicate content is bad for SEO. I was just thinking... Whenever I post new content to a blog, website page etc...there should be something I should be able to do to tell Google (in fact all search engines) that I just created and posted this content to the web... that I am the original source .... so if anyone else copies it they get penalised and not me... Would appreciate your answers... 🙂 regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopGearMedia0