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
-
How to fix Duplicate Content Warnings on Pagination? Indexed Pagination?
Hi all! So we have a Wordpress blog that properly has pagination tags of rel="prev" and rel="next" set up for pages, but we're still getting crawl errors with MOZ for duplicate content on all of our pagination pages. Also, we are having all of our pages indexed as well. I'm talking pages as deep as page 89 for the home page. Is this something I should ignore? Is it hurting my SEO potentially? If so, how can I start tackling it for a fix? Would "noindex" or "nofollow" be a good idea? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jampaper0 -
About duplicate content
We have to products: - loan for a new car
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBC
- load for a second hand car Except for title tag, meta desc and H1, the content is of course very similmar. Are these pages considered as duplicate content? https://new.kbc.be/product/lenen/voertuig/autolening-tweedehands-auto.html
https://new.kbc.be/product/lenen/voertuig/autolening-nieuwe-auto.html thanks for the advice,0 -
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre1 -
Penalized for Duplicate Page Content?
I have some high priority notices regarding duplicate page content on my website www.3000doorhangers.com Most of the pages listed here are on our sample pages: http://www.3000doorhangers.com/home/door-hanger-pricing/door-hanger-design-samples/ On the left side of our page you can go through the different categories. Most of the category pages have similar text. We mainly just changed the industry on each page. Is this something that google would penalize us for? Should I go through all the pages and use completely unique text for each page? Any suggestions would be helpful Thanks! Andrea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Can I duplicate my websites content on Ebay Store?
Our company is setting up a store on Ebay. Is it okay to duplicate our content descriptions on our ebay store with a link going back to our website? Or would this potentially hurt us in Search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hfranz0 -
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 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?
A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author? Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A. Will that work, or is there a better solution? This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Allie_Williams0