Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best Practices for Converting PDFs to HTML
-
We're working with a client who gets about 80% of their organic, inbound search traffic from links to PDF files on their site.
Obviously, this isn't ideal, because someone who just downloads a PDF file directly from a Google query is unlikely to interact with the site in any other way.
I'm looking to develop a plan to convert those PDF files to HTML content, and try to get at least some of those visitors to convert into subscribers.
What's the best way to go about this? My plan so far is:
- Develop HTML landing pages for each of the popular PDFs, with the content from the PDF, as well as the option to download the PDF with an email signup.
- Gradually implement 301 redirects for the existing PDFs, and see what that does to our inbound SEO traffic. I don't want to create a dip in traffic, although our current "direct to inbound" traffic is largely useless.
Are their things I should watch out for? Will I get penalized by Google for redirecting a PDF to HTML content? Other things I should be aware of?
-
No, you won't get penalized for redirecting the PDFs to HTML versions of them. In fact, Google will like it.
Here's a video that may help you out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDzq-94lcWQ
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
-
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash
i've to give some information about my website Environment 1. i have static webpage in the root. 2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/ 3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeatIT
folder. i want to www to non on all URLs Remove index.html from url Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
without .html extension Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Some examples domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/ domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/ My code in ROOT htaccess is <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / #removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> The above code do 1. redirect www to non-www
2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
3. Remove index.html
4. Remove all .html
5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end0 -
The Great Subdomain vs. Subfolder Debate, what is the best answer?
Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain. They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict. John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50 Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains. He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference. http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/ Here is another post from the Website Magazine. They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure. Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important. http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/03/10/seo-inquiry-subdomains-subdirectories.aspx Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller. Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB3 -
What is the best way to find related forums in your industry?
Hi Guys, Just wondering what is the best way to find forums in your industry?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may2 -
Image URLs - best practice
Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Best practice for expandable content
We are in the middle of having new pages added to our website. On our website we will have a information section containing various details about a product, this information will be several paragraphs long. we were wanting to show the first paragraph and have a read more button to show the rest of the content that is hidden. Whats googles view on this, is this bad for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Ending URLs in .html versus /
Hi there! Currently all the URLs on my website, even the home page, end it .html, such as http://www,consumerbase.com/index.html Is this bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Is there any benefit to this? Should I remove it and just have them end with a forward slash?
If I 301 redirect the old .html URLs to the forward slash URLs, will I lose PA? Thanks!0 -
ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site. Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category. This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product. So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content? Is this the best way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spiralsites0