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    4. PDF ranking higher than HTML pages, solution?

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    PDF ranking higher than HTML pages, solution?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • Neverstop123
      Neverstop123 last edited by

      Hello Moz community

      I know this question has been asked before but it seems there is no real answer other than putting a summary of the PDF on the HTML page. My problem is other websites are using my PDFs, I have some PDFs with very high authority links and I would like to either pass the link juice on to my product/category page or do rel=canonical somehow. I'm using bigcommerce as my platform. My website is cwwltd.com. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

      Thank you

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Neverstop123
        Neverstop123 @EGOL last edited by

        Thank you, I will try to add links in the PDFs and see if that helps at all.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Neverstop123
          Neverstop123 @dohertyjf last edited by

          Hello John

          The problem with modifying headers is I don't have access to .htaccess because I use bigcommerce platform. So I'm not sure how I would add rel canonical for the PDFs? Can I somehow do it with the link to the PDF?

          Thank you

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • EGOL
            EGOL last edited by

            Put links in the pdfs.  Edit their "properties" to optimize them for the SERPs.  You can place "buy buttons" in pdfs, include ads in them.  Track the number of views through log analytics.

            Search here and here to get lots more information about using pdfs.

            Neverstop123 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • dohertyjf
              dohertyjf last edited by

              Hi there! Great question and one that has perplexed SEOs for years.

              You are indeed right that one of the best ways to rank the page over the PDF is to put some of the PDF content on your page and do other best SEO practices (eg build links to the page, have a better optimized title/etc than the PDF itself). It is also possible to put the rel-canonical in the header of the PDF - https://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

              Finally, if you don't want your actual PDF showing up in the search results, consider a) blocking it in the robots.txt and then b) requesting the URL be removed from the search index via Search Console.

              Good luck!

              Neverstop123 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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