PDF on financial site that duplicates ~50% of site content
-
I have a financial advisor client who has a downloadable PDF on his site that contains about 9 pages of good info. Problem is much of the content can also be found on individual pages of his site.
Is it best to noindex/follow the pdf? It would be great to let the few pages of original content be crawlable, but I'm concerned about the duplicate content aspect.
Thanks --
-
This is what we have done with pdfs. Assign rel="canonical" in .htaccess.
We did this with a few hundred files and it took google a LONG time to find and credit them.
-
You could set the header to noindex rather than rel=canonical
-
Personally I think it would be better not to index, it but if necessary, the index folder root seems like a good option
-
Thanks. Anybody want to weigh in on where to rel=canonical to? Home page?
-
If you are using apache, you should put it on your .htaccess with this form
<filesmatch “my-file.pdf”="">Header set Link ‘<http: misite="" my-file.html="">; rel=”canonical”‘</http:></filesmatch>
-
I think the right way here is to put the rel canonical in PDF header http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html
-
I thought the idea was to put rel=canonical on the duplicated page, to signal that "hey, this page may look like duplicate content, but please refer to this canonical URL"?
Looks like there is a pdf option for rel=canonical, I guess the question is, what page on the site to make canonical?
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Indicate the canonical version of a URL by responding with the
Link rel="canonical"HTTP header. Addingrel="canonical"to theheadsection of a page is useful for HTML content, but it can't be used for PDFs and other file types indexed by Google Web Search. In these cases you can indicate a canonical URL by responding with theLink rel="canonical"HTTP header, like this (note that to use this option, you'll need to be able to configure your server):Link: <http: www.example.com="" downloads="" white-paper.pdf="">; rel="canonical"</http:>
-
Hi Keith,
I'm sorry, I should have clarified. The rel=canonical tags would be on your Web pages, not the PDF (they are irrelevant in a PDF document). Then Google will attribute your Web page as the original source of the content and will understand that the PDF just contains bits of content from those pages. In this instance I would include a rel=canonical tag on every page of your site, just to cover your bases. Hope that helps!
Dana
-
Not sure which page I would mark as being canonical, since the pdf contains content from several different pages on the site. I don't think it's possible to assign different rel=canonical tags to separate portions of a pdf, is it?
-
As long as you have rel=canonical tags properly in place, you don't need to worry about the PDF causing duplicate content problems. That way, any original content should be picked up and any duplicate can be attributed to your existing Web pages. Hope that's helpful!
Dana
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
-
Duplicate page content on numerical blog pages?
Hello everyone, I'm still relatively new at SEO and am still trying my best to learn. However, I have this persistent issue. My site is on WordPress and all of my blog pages e.g page one, page two etc are all coming up as duplicate content. Here are some URL examples of what I mean: http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/3/ http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/4/ Does anyone have any ideas? I have already no indexed categories and tags so it is not them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3mil0 -
Is legacy duplicate content an issue?
I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content. The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime 😉 ] The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit. Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 ! Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fammy0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
What do I do about sites that copy my content?
I've noticed that there are a number of websites that are copying my content. They are putting the full article on their site, mentioning that it was reposted from my site, but contains no links to me. How should I approach this? What are my rights and should I ask them to remove it or add a link? Will the duplicate content affect me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Http and https duplicate content?
Hello, This is a quick one or two. 🙂 If I have a page accessible on http and https count as duplicate content? What about external links pointing to my website to the http or https page. Regards, Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Duplicate Content Warning For Pages That Do Not Exist
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here. I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around. Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go. Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption url 1: / url 2: /about/who-we-are I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear The second one I am getting is the following: /services/57/ /services/ Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools. If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this. Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | southcoasthost0 -
Guest blogging and duplicate content
I have a guest blog prepared and several sites I can submit it to, would it be considered duplicate content if I submitted one guest blog post to multipul blogs? and if so this content is not on my site but is linking to it. What will google do? Lets say 5 blogs except the same content and post it up, I understand that the first blog to have it up will not be punished, what about the rest of the blogs? can they get punished for this duplicate content? can I get punished for having duplicate content linking to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0