DO outbound links to manufacture specs, pdfs help or hurt SEO?
-
I am creating an e-commerce site.
All the products have product certification documents/images, PDF docs for instructions, manufacture specs, etc.
Should I host all this content or simply link to the original documents and content? What is the best for SEO?
Thank you,
-
Thanks for the response.
Sorry for the dumb questions -- If I have a bunch of PDF's, why is this useful?
Does this allow Google to crawl them and I get the SEO juice?
-
Can google crawl attachments for keywords? (PDFs, photos, etc)
Lots of manufactures only host links to PDF.
If possible I want to either copy and paste that content on my site so it gets crawled and I get the SEO juice. Will this work?
-
The line is in the ratio of your duplicate content to unique content. I don't know of any hard and fast ratio rule but it is primarily the unique content that will be most helpful as you to build your site's authority against your keyword competitors.
-
Assuming this is OK with suppliers is there any tactics to take that content and get it to help my SEO?
Eg. Copy the PDF words, put it on my own PDF branding and re upload or just take that offline content and paste into my page?
Where is the line between duplicate and unique content?
Thank you!
-
Assuming it's useful and relevant Google will like that and so will your users
-
You could also host PDFs as embeds. This snippet I found the other day deemed pretty useful:
<object data="/pdf/sample-3pp.pdf#page=2" type="application/pdf" width="100%" height="100%">Example fallback content: This browser does not support PDFs. Please download the PDF to view it: Download PDF.</object>
-
I agree with all of Chris's suggestions.
In some situations, you will see that the information for a few popular products is being heavily used. In those situations it may be helpful to create your own content.
You may have a situations where your product knowledge, customer knowledge, content creating ability, ambition, and willingness to invest in your website greatly exceeds that of the manufacturer and all other competitors. In these situations, you have the opportunity to create the best site on the web for a consumer topic or product line.
The investment above is most valuable when you have a product with broad appeal and where its use requires special knowledge or skill that you have the ability to present on a website. It is also important to consider the expected consumer lifetime of the product (not the item), because that determines if you are producing content that will be of temporary or evergreen value.
-
Hi James,
It may help your site as far as engagement numbers if your visitors frequent those documents but the fact that it's duplicate won't be lost on Google. If you think it will benefit visitors by having it on your site, you could canonicalize it so at least it references the original from your site.
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
-
Looking for SEO Help- Magento Temporary Redirects
We recently launched a new site (www.CanyonOS.com) on Magento Enterprise. We have run several crawl tests with Moz and keep receiving 302 redirect errors. We've used the admin console for our site to apply 301 redirects in every area that we could but have had no success. (Last audit was completed on August 14) We are receiving 301 redirects on the following types of pages totaling 43k issues 😞 A majority of these issues are when adding and comparing products to the following types of urls. domain.com**/catalog/**product_compare/ domain.com**/wishlist/**index/add/product/ domain.com**/checkout/**cart/add/ Any suggestions from any SEO gurus? Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CanyonOS0 -
Help in Internal Links
Which link attribute should be given to internal links of website? Do follow or No follow and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page
Scenario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
We have 4 unique links.
In total we have 5 on page links. Question
How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
Long term strategy to retain link 'goodness', I need some help!
Hi, I have a few questions around the best approach to retain as much link juice / authority from transitioning multiple domains into 1 single domain over the next year or so. I have 2 similar websites (www.brandA.co.uk and www.brandB.co.uk) which I need to transition to a new website (www.brandC.co.uk) over the next 2 years. Both A&B are established and have there own brand value, brand C will be a new website. I need to start introducing the brand from website C onto A&B straight away and then eventually drop the brands from A&B and just be left with C. One idea I am considering is: www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandA.brandC.co.uk (brandA sits as a subdomain on brandC website) Ultimately over time I would drop the subdomain (brandA) and just be left with www.brandC.co.uk The other option is: www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandC.co.uk/brandA...with the same ultimate aim as above. In both above case the same would be done for brandB, either becoming a subdomain of a folder on brandC website What I need to know is what is the best way to first pass any SEO goodness from the websites for brandA and brandB to the intermediate solution of either brandA.brandC.co.uk or brandC.co.uk/brandA (I see this intermediate solution being in place for approx 2 years). And then how to transition the intermediate solution into just having brandC.co.uk Which solution will aid growing the SEO goodness on the final brandC.co.uk website? Does google see subdomains as part of the main domain and thus the main domain will benefit from any links going to the subdomain or is it better to always use /folders as google sees these as more part of one website? ...or is there another option that I haven't considered? I know it's rater confusing so please give me a shout if you want anymore info. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cewe0 -
Is the <a data-uri="">link SEO friendly?</a>
We've earned a great link from a popular website but it is in a strange format: <a data-uri="http:;;;;;;;;www.domain.com;;;;" target="_blank">blue widgets</a> It is still visible as a link from the web browsers, but I was wondering how will it perform in terms of SEO visibility and crawabillity? Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartinPanayotov
Thanks!
Martin0 -
SEO Tools
Anyone have any experience and thoughts about the woo rank website and seo tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4341 -
Indirect SEO boost from links
I have 2 ecommerce sites, each with a blog. I am increasing my linkbuilding efforts, but I don't want to build too many links directly to my 2 sites over a short period of time. I have decided that I will add a certain number of links to sites/pages that are already linking to my main sites (for example, a blog post on my blog, guest post on another blog, article submission, etc.). How much of a benefit can I expect in terms of rankings? Has anyone tested this out or experimented with something like this? What are the pros and cons? I appreciate thoughtful comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0