Would a free PDF download diminish SEO benefits of HTML content?
-
Hello,
I am doing SEO for a company that, as a sideline business, sells four books written by the principals; the content is directly relevant to the company's primary business focus. Book sales are a tiny fraction of our overall revenue, and we don't expect that to change, although we will continue to sell the books.
In addition to selling them, we have decided to convert the books to HTML and post them for free on our website (laid out by chapter and section). The hope is that this will result in goodwill, links, traffic, and ultimately improved search rankings.
My question: Would offering free PDF downloads of the books (in addition to posting the HTML content) diminish the SEO benefits of the HTML content?
- If we don't offer the PDF option, people would have to visit our site to read the content (unless they bought a hard copy).
- If visitors were able to download a free PDF, they wouldn't need to return to our site to read it.
- If our corporate clients (nearly all of our clients are corporations) could download a PDF, they could then post it on an intranet instead of posting a link to our site.
- In general, do you think a visitor would be less likely to link to our site if he or she were able to download the PDF? Or would the appeal of the PDF option make it more likely that people would visit and link to the site?
- Also, if we offer the PDF option, are there any SEO issues related to duplicate content?
- Finally, if we did offer the free PDF download, would you recommend that we ask for an email address before giving the PDF?
Thank you very much!
-
Okay, thanks.
-
I make nice money from ads on html pages. And, if you have ten chapters that each focus on a different keyword, then you have ten html pages in the SERPs with great optimization instead of one PDF with generalized optimization. And when people land they look at many pages, often all ten. Each of these earns ad impressions. I am publishing for ad revenue.
-
Thank you, Alex!
-
Thank you, EGOL!
Do you think there is any reason to consider offering PDFs and not posting the HTML versions? Or do you prefer the approach of having the HTML and also offering PDFs?
-
You can add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs to avoid any duplicate content problems: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers
If you think these PDFs are really valuable, and e-mail addresses will be useful to you, then yes - you should ask for an e-mail address to download them. If you don't take that route and they're indexed as part of your website, make sure you have a few links to your websites within the PDFs so you get some value if people rehost them.
Make sure your branding and website is obvious on the PDFs whatever you do.
-
There are many ways to handle this.
I have sites with lots of free pdf documents. Each of those documents contains content that is not on the website. Lots of people visit and print them. Lots of people link to them. When they are printed our branding is prominently displayed so that people can return for our site to get other similar documents. We also have one or more links in those pdf documents so any links into them pass value into our website. If someone else posts them on their domain the links again point to our website. In addition, the properties of the pdf documents are edited to give them a title tag that will be visible in the SERPs and help them rank better.
It is possible to monetize pdf documents. You can rent/sell adspace within them that can be linked or not be linked. Many shopping carts allow you to produce "add to cart" buttons. These can be configured to work within pdf documents.
A friend of mine has a situation like yours. He has a collection of webpages that are each chapters of a single topic document that he also has in a pdf document with many pages. People can view the html pages on his site for free (they are monetized by ads). Or, they can purchase the pdf. The pdf allows them to print the document, search the entire document, view it offline or conveniently page through it linearly. He has many of these pdf documents and even though people can view the same content free on his website many of them purchase these pdfs for the print/search/scroll/use-offline abilities. He makes nice money from selling these pdf documents.
-
If we don't offer the PDF option, people would have to visit our site to read the content (unless they bought a hard copy).
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF -
if visitors were able to download a free PDF, they wouldn't need to return to our site to read it.
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF
- If our corporate clients (nearly all of our clients are corporations) could download a PDF, they could then post it on an intranet instead of posting a link to our site.
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF
- In general, do you think a visitor would be less likely to link to our site if he or she were able to download the PDF? Or would the appeal of the PDF option make it more likely that people would visit and link to the site?
MOST PEOPLE WILL NOT LINK. ONLY PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SAY... "GET SOMETHING AWESOME HERE". THE PROBLEM IS THAT THEY WILL LINK TO THE PDF BUT IF YOU HAVE LINKS IN THE PDF THEN YOUR WEBSITE WILL GET SOME BENEFIT. BUT I WOULD BE SELLING THIS PDF.
- Also, if we offer the PDF option, are there any SEO issues related to duplicate content?
IF YOU HAVE 500 WORDS ON AN HTML PAGE AND THE SAME 500 WORDS IN A PDF THEN YOU MIGHT HAVE A PROBLEM. BUT IF YOU HAVE 50 PAGES EACH OF 500 WORDS ON THE WEBSITE AND 25000 WORDS IN ONE PDF DOCUMENT THEN THERE SHOULD BE NO PROBLEM. BUT IF YOU SELL THE PDF THAT CONCERN IS ELIMINATED.
- Finally, if we did offer the free PDF download, would you recommend that we ask for an email address before giving the PDF?
IS GETTING THE EMAIL ADDRESSES A GOAL? IF THAT IS WHY YOU ARE DOING THIS THEN, YES, ASK FOR IT, AND REQUIRING THE EMAIL IN ADVANCE SUGGESTS THAT THE PDF WILL NOT BE INDEXED WHERE IT CAN BE LINKED TO OR HAVE ANY CHANCE OF BEING A DUPE CONTENT PROBLEM. I WOULD BE SELLING THE PDF.
-
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
-
What constitutes duplicate content on a page?
I am working on SEO for a Shopify store. Their products are very similar, hence the pages are so similar that Moz shows them as duplicate content. The only difference in the product pages is the title and model number. I am going to "go for the gold" and try re-writing all the product descriptions. It's incredibly difficult due to the products being nearly identical with just a minor variation. I know I could go down the road of just creating variants --- but the customer is not down for that. Here's my question: what constitutes duplicate content? 80% of the content, 90%???? If I can going to re-write the descriptions, what should I aim for? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | steve_linn1 -
Homepage SEO
Hi I have designed my site with about 10 pages which focus on my main keywords. My question is what should I do about the homepage? Do I focus on a keyword on just my brand name? The homepage is a showcase of all my services and a bit about us. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | TIG990 -
On-page SEO reviews
Hi everyone 🙂 I was hoping someone could point me in a direction on where I could get my website's on-page SEO a review with recommendations. Title tags, meta description, code, H1s, content and so on... I know you can find most of what I'm asking online, but I would like a professional with a new set of eyes to help out. Thanks in advance for your time in helping!
On-Page Optimization | | AutoGlassRescue0 -
Duplicate Page Content Issues
How can I fix Duplicate Page Content Issues on my site : www.ifocalmedia.com. This is a WP site and the diagnostics shows I have 115 errors? I know this is damaging to my SEO campaign how do I clear these? Any help is very welcome.
On-Page Optimization | | shami0 -
Seo-friendly way to post blog content to homepage?
We have an e-commerce website. We would like to feature content from our blog on the site's homepage (both on same domain). The content we want to feature is latest posts titles (say 5) plus the few first lines from each post. We want search engines to be able to read this content. Is there a SEO friendly way to achieve this? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH0 -
Duplicate content on homepage?
Hi I have just created a new campaign and it states that I have duplicate page content which would affect search rankings. Basically it is counting my site www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.php as two seperate pages. How can I make it so that only www.mydomain.com is visible reducing the duplicate content issue? Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | idv0 -
Panda Update and Website Content
According to the Panda Update information, website content that is or was written to help with SEO is now not the best idea, but content that is very informative and interesting is the way to go. But if you have an Ecommerce Website how can you write informative bookmarking content, if each product you sell is very similar, and the information for the product is just details about the product. Its hard to write good content for an eCommerce website. We have 300+ products that are all similar, but if we would write content about each product, it would be similar and not interesting to read. People just want to purchase the product, not read a bunch of content. How do websites that sell many products and not content driven websites rank well in search?
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0 -
SEO for E-Commerce
Hello Guys, First of all, I wanna say that I just have some 1-2 years experience in SEO, I´m not a GURU or expert ok? So, take it easy... I have one costumer which wanna develop a E-COMMERCE focusing SEO and best pratices of web development. What care should I have? I mean the most important issues... From the coice of domain name to very specific point. What is the main mistakes SEO made at develop a E-COMMERCE? Thanks so much 😃
On-Page Optimization | | augustos0