How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?
-
Hi All,
I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product.Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a>
<a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice?
Thanks</a>
-
Dear Egol,
I'm assuming by your answer that PDF's take link juice and JPG's don't (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Is that the case even if I have <a href="">to enlarge the image? (I use href with JQuery and not regular target=_blank)</a>
<a href="">Also, what to do about the certificates that are on other sites? (too many and rapidly changing for me to get it to my site)</a>
-
Thanks,
I was assuming that these had product dimensions, how to use, etc information. I would want all of that content on my site.
If these are certificates then I would link to them as .jpg images and that eliminates concerns about link juice.
-
Dear Egol,
Thank for the reply. I'm guessing my example for product guides was not exact.
These are not guides but rather certificates of authentication which the customers expect to see. Some I have in PDF's, some in JPG's and some I refer to a cetificate page in another site. The question is what to do...I currently use "nofollow" links on all types of certificates (jpg, pdf and links to other site). What do you suggest to do?
I was considering either window.open (which I fear would look spammy) or leaving it as is...
Thanks
-
Just saying what I would do if this was my website.
My employees would be told that getting that pdf data onto the product sales page is a top priority job... and I would call the car dealer and order my new Jaguar.
-
I don't think having them indexed would do me any good.
The important page is the product page itself - the way I see it, there is no good reason to lose link juice for these guides...
I'm trying to improve my sites overall performance.
Important note...
Also, I have some cases where the manuals are pages on the manufacturer's site. Should I change these links from follow to JS links in order not to lose the juice from my site to other sites?
-
Are you just trying to streamline your product pages, or are you experiencing a specific issue with your product pages that you're hoping this will solve?
Linking to the PDF's via a javascript function should help preserve link juice and crawl budget.
You should only add those PDF's that have been indexed to the robots.txt if you absolutely do not want them in the index, otherwise it won't really do anything to help.
-
Due to your answer I checked and I see that some of the PDF's are indexed.
I didn't know that Google does that.
It is probably from the time that the links were not "nofollow".Should I exclude them using robots.txt?
-
Are the PDF's currently being crawled and indexed?
If you want to hide the PDF's from search engines, and preserve link juice, then a javascript method like you've mentioned ought to keep things wrapped up.
You could also consider some data capture, such as requiring an e-mail address to be entered before you see the download link.
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
-
Internal Link Rank Flow
I've read in many articles that pages can "pass" rank to other pages internally. Is anyone aware of any well done internal linking case studies which confirm this? If my homepage has the strongest Page Authority, would linking to another page deeper into my website from my homepage boost my rank for the deeper page in Google (more so than linking to the deep page from a page with lower page authority)?
Technical SEO | | poke10 -
Will links be counted?
We are considering a redesign of our website and one of the options we are considering is to come up with something along the lines of http://www.tesco.com/, with rotating top offers. The question I am wondering is whether or not the links (ie. the blue links on the left side of the main graphic) will be visible to the spiders, and if not, whether there is a way to code it so they are?
Technical SEO | | simonukss0 -
How do you perform your link audits?
What methods and tools do you guys use to perform link audits? Do you also use a traffic light system for links?
Technical SEO | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Link Diversity
With the current updates in the Seo world how critical is link diversity. We are revamping our site and planning to add many new pages to our site and planning to build links to relevant pages with relevant anchor texts keywords. Also we are planning to add relevant H1, H2 and H3 tags with metatag description and content with keyword rich content specific to that page. Any advise
Technical SEO | | INN0 -
Banners loosing SEO Juice?.
Buonjourno from Latitude 53.92705600 Longitude -1.38481600 🙂 On this site http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/ therre are multiple banners pointing to 3rd party sites illustrated here http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/banner-links-to-other-sites.jpg so my question is please: 1. What affect if any will these banners loose SEO juice (Love that pharse not) 2. If they are detrimental will adding nofollow links resolve the problem or... is linking out no problem in terms of loosing authority. GRazzie TAnto, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Google Shows 24K Links b/w 2 sites that are not linked
Good Morning, Does anyone have any idea why Google WMT shows me that i have 24,101 backlinks from one of my sites ( http://goo.gl/Jb4ng ) pointing to my other site ( http://goo.gl/JgK1e ) ... These sites have zero links between them, as far as I can see/tell. Can someone please help me figure out why Google is showing 24k backlinks? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Anchor links percent
I really don't have a clue about how many internal anchor links are recommended for a page. I think it could be split into anchor text in the article content and also in the whole page. The article content: Only the unique content of this page The whole page: Everthing including menus, sitemap, etc. Does percent really matter? Could an excesive amount of anchor links diminish pagerank in the source page? Can google see an excesive amount of internal content links as spamming? Thanks 🙂 !!
Technical SEO | | heroselohim0 -
Track outbound links
I would like to track outbound links at http://bit.ly/yYHmbf 1. Shall i add the following code before at the above page What does 100 means in above code ? 2. Then use this for each outgoing link ``` [onClick="recordOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com');return false;">](http://www.example.com) ``` [](http://www.example.com) ```[``` http://www.example.com is the outbound link Am i right on both counts ? where should i look for report in GA ? ```](http://www.example.com)
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050