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
-
How would you link build to this page?
Hi Guys, I'm looking to build links to a commercial page similar to this: https://apolloblinds.com.au/venetian-blinds/ How would you even create quality links (not against Google TOS) to a commercial page like that? Any ideas would be very much appreciated. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Potential Pagination Issue/ Duplicate content issue
Hi All, We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing. We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?.. Any advice would be greatly appreciated? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Could this be seen as duplicate content in Google's eyes?
Hi I'm an in-house SEO and we've recently seen Panda related traffic loss along with some of our main keywords slipping down the SERPs. Looking for possible Panda related issues I was wondering if the following could be seen as duplicate content. We've got some very similar holidays (travel company) on our website. While they are different I'm concerned it may be seen as creating content that is too similar: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/the-wildlife-and-beaches-of-kenya.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/ultimate-kenya-wildlife-and-beaches.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/wildlife-and-beach-family-safari.aspx They do all have unique text but as you can see from the titles, they are very similar (note from an SEO point of view the tabbed content is all within the same page at source level). At the top level of the holiday pages we have a filtered search:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays.aspx These pages have a unique introduction but the content snippets being pulled into the boxes is drawn from each of the individual holiday pages. I'm just concerned that these could be introducing some duplicating issues. Any thoughts?0 -
Duplicate Page Content - Shopify
Moz reports that there are 1,600+ pages on my site (Sportiqe.com) that qualify as Duplicate Page Content. The website sells licensed apparel, causing shirts to go into multiple categories (ie - LA Lakers shirts would be categorized in three areas: Men's Shirts, LA Lakers Shirts and NBA Shirts)It looks like "tags" are the primary cause behind the duplicate content issues: // Collection Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts (Preferred URL): http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag): http://sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag, w/o the www.): http://sportiqe.com/collections/all-products/clippers (Different collection, w/ tag and same content)// Blog Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/7902801-dispatch-is-back: http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/tagged/elias-fundWould it make sense to do 301 redirects for the collection tags and use the Parameter Tool in Webmaster Tools to exclude blog post tags from their crawl? Or, is there a possible solution with the rel=cannonical tag?Appreciate any insight from fellow Shopify users and the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farmiloe0 -
Daily Link Building tactics to move the needle
I know most of you may frown upon this question, but to those of you who are still going after blog commenting, forum posting, Q&A sites (even if that means you're getting nofollow links), do you have any recommendations on a guide/blog post that describes how to create a daily "low level" link building program to supplement the higher level, relationship dependent link building that you're already doing? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Best Link Solicitation Email Structure - Link Building
Hello, What is the best thing to say when soliciting a link for link building. Say you're contacting a site with a resource section where your competitors are listed. What would you say to be the most persuasive. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Directories - Bad or Good for Link Building (Discussion on Penguin)
Hello, I would like to hear everybodies opinion on directories for link building now that penguin is out. Here's a good background post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger Do you think their out? How do you still use them? Which ones do you stick to?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Affiliate Site Duplicate Content Question
Hi Guys I have been un-able to find a definite answer to this on various forums, your views on this will be very valuable. I am doing a few Amazon affiliate sites and will be pulling in product data from Amazon via a Wordpress plugin. The plugin pulls in titles, descriptions, images, prices etc, however this presents a duplicate content issue and hence I can not publish the product pages with amazon descriptions. Due to the large number of products, it is not feasible to re-write all descriptions, but I plan re-write descriptions and titles for 50% of the products and publish then with “index, follow” attribute. However, for the other 50%, what would be the best way to handle them? Should I publish them as “noindex,follow”? **- Or is there another solution? Many thanks for your time.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0