Thanks Chris, Bernadette and Donna for your thoughtful answers.  After considering your advice (and the resources you shared), I think it's worth a try.  If nothing else, it will be a good experiment (and fairly low risk -- even though the pdf ranks #1, it's not a high-volume term).  I think it will be important for the landing page to provide a really meaty, useful synopsis (as Chris suggested) that still offers some value on its own.  Thanks again!

-John

Hi!  We have a pdf of a white paper on our site that ranks #1 for a niche term.  We are now exploring the idea of building a landing page for this paper with an overview (2-3 paragraphs) and a registration form for interested parties to fill out in order to access the paper.

Do you think there'd be any hope of ensuring the new landing page would rank almost as well eventually (top 3)? I'm thinking a key consideration would be preserving the link juice from the existing links that are coming into the pdf, and that 301 redirecting the pdf URL to the new landing page URL could help with that.  Am I right?  Or would it be better to try to reach out to the linking sites and ask them to update their links (seems daunting).

Any advice/opinions on this situation would be appreciated.  (If folks think that there would be a significant risk of permanently dropping out of the top 5 by attempting this, we would likely choose to leave the pdf ungated as is.)  Thanks!!

-John

Thanks Chris, Bernadette and Donna for your thoughtful answers.  After considering your advice (and the resources you shared), I think it's worth a try.  If nothing else, it will be a good experiment (and fairly low risk -- even though the pdf ranks #1, it's not a high-volume term).  I think it will be important for the landing page to provide a really meaty, useful synopsis (as Chris suggested) that still offers some value on its own.  Thanks again!

-John