Would a free PDF download diminish SEO benefits of HTML content?
-
Hello,
I am doing SEO for a company that, as a sideline business, sells four books written by the principals; the content is directly relevant to the company's primary business focus. Book sales are a tiny fraction of our overall revenue, and we don't expect that to change, although we will continue to sell the books.
In addition to selling them, we have decided to convert the books to HTML and post them for free on our website (laid out by chapter and section). The hope is that this will result in goodwill, links, traffic, and ultimately improved search rankings.
My question: Would offering free PDF downloads of the books (in addition to posting the HTML content) diminish the SEO benefits of the HTML content?
- If we don't offer the PDF option, people would have to visit our site to read the content (unless they bought a hard copy).
- If visitors were able to download a free PDF, they wouldn't need to return to our site to read it.
- If our corporate clients (nearly all of our clients are corporations) could download a PDF, they could then post it on an intranet instead of posting a link to our site.
- In general, do you think a visitor would be less likely to link to our site if he or she were able to download the PDF? Or would the appeal of the PDF option make it more likely that people would visit and link to the site?
- Also, if we offer the PDF option, are there any SEO issues related to duplicate content?
- Finally, if we did offer the free PDF download, would you recommend that we ask for an email address before giving the PDF?
Thank you very much!
-
Okay, thanks.
-
I make nice money from ads on html pages. And, if you have ten chapters that each focus on a different keyword, then you have ten html pages in the SERPs with great optimization instead of one PDF with generalized optimization. And when people land they look at many pages, often all ten. Each of these earns ad impressions. I am publishing for ad revenue.
-
Thank you, Alex!
-
Thank you, EGOL!
Do you think there is any reason to consider offering PDFs and not posting the HTML versions? Or do you prefer the approach of having the HTML and also offering PDFs?
-
You can add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs to avoid any duplicate content problems: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers
If you think these PDFs are really valuable, and e-mail addresses will be useful to you, then yes - you should ask for an e-mail address to download them. If you don't take that route and they're indexed as part of your website, make sure you have a few links to your websites within the PDFs so you get some value if people rehost them.
Make sure your branding and website is obvious on the PDFs whatever you do.
-
There are many ways to handle this.
I have sites with lots of free pdf documents. Each of those documents contains content that is not on the website. Lots of people visit and print them. Lots of people link to them. When they are printed our branding is prominently displayed so that people can return for our site to get other similar documents. We also have one or more links in those pdf documents so any links into them pass value into our website. If someone else posts them on their domain the links again point to our website. In addition, the properties of the pdf documents are edited to give them a title tag that will be visible in the SERPs and help them rank better.
It is possible to monetize pdf documents. You can rent/sell adspace within them that can be linked or not be linked. Many shopping carts allow you to produce "add to cart" buttons. These can be configured to work within pdf documents.
A friend of mine has a situation like yours. He has a collection of webpages that are each chapters of a single topic document that he also has in a pdf document with many pages. People can view the html pages on his site for free (they are monetized by ads). Or, they can purchase the pdf. The pdf allows them to print the document, search the entire document, view it offline or conveniently page through it linearly. He has many of these pdf documents and even though people can view the same content free on his website many of them purchase these pdfs for the print/search/scroll/use-offline abilities. He makes nice money from selling these pdf documents.
-
If we don't offer the PDF option, people would have to visit our site to read the content (unless they bought a hard copy).
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF -
if visitors were able to download a free PDF, they wouldn't need to return to our site to read it.
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF
- If our corporate clients (nearly all of our clients are corporations) could download a PDF, they could then post it on an intranet instead of posting a link to our site.
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF
- In general, do you think a visitor would be less likely to link to our site if he or she were able to download the PDF? Or would the appeal of the PDF option make it more likely that people would visit and link to the site?
MOST PEOPLE WILL NOT LINK. ONLY PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SAY... "GET SOMETHING AWESOME HERE". THE PROBLEM IS THAT THEY WILL LINK TO THE PDF BUT IF YOU HAVE LINKS IN THE PDF THEN YOUR WEBSITE WILL GET SOME BENEFIT. BUT I WOULD BE SELLING THIS PDF.
- Also, if we offer the PDF option, are there any SEO issues related to duplicate content?
IF YOU HAVE 500 WORDS ON AN HTML PAGE AND THE SAME 500 WORDS IN A PDF THEN YOU MIGHT HAVE A PROBLEM. BUT IF YOU HAVE 50 PAGES EACH OF 500 WORDS ON THE WEBSITE AND 25000 WORDS IN ONE PDF DOCUMENT THEN THERE SHOULD BE NO PROBLEM. BUT IF YOU SELL THE PDF THAT CONCERN IS ELIMINATED.
- Finally, if we did offer the free PDF download, would you recommend that we ask for an email address before giving the PDF?
IS GETTING THE EMAIL ADDRESSES A GOAL? IF THAT IS WHY YOU ARE DOING THIS THEN, YES, ASK FOR IT, AND REQUIRING THE EMAIL IN ADVANCE SUGGESTS THAT THE PDF WILL NOT BE INDEXED WHERE IT CAN BE LINKED TO OR HAVE ANY CHANCE OF BEING A DUPE CONTENT PROBLEM. I WOULD BE SELLING THE PDF.
-
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
-
Have I chosen the wrong SEO consultant?
Hi all I've very recently started a small chimney sweeping business for which my friend has designed and built a website, kembersembers.co.uk. Not approaching this from a tech-savvy background I have learnt a lot over the past month but am still an utter novice and as such require some form of help to get me up and running. My main and immediate priority (sweeping season starts soon!) was to have it so when my company name, kembers embers, was googled I would come up at the top of the results. I understand this can take a little time but it has been a month now since I indexed and I have been told my domain authority is 0.1% so I have sought help. I don't want to sign up to a 3/6/12 month contract with a firm so I found an SEO consultant local to me who said they could spend a couple of hours doing the right things to hopefully help jump this initial hurdle. I parted with £120 for this which I deemed to be the going rate and they do/did seem honest and professional enough. Upon meeting the consultant he has since told me that he would like to set the website up under a Wordpress template and has cajouled me into changing my hosting over to one he uses also. He says it will take a couple of hours work to do this (there goes my £120) but without this he would hit walls which would be timely to get past and so will save me money in the long run. Do these kind of suggestions ring an alarm bell to anyone? It didn't seem right that a good SEO couldn't work with what I already have so it leads me to the question is this one to avoid? On a side note I have also received bad advice from friends of friends/family who claim to know SEO but have, for example, put me in the direction of a link scheme through fiverr.com which I understand may have done me more damage than good. I am now more aware of white hat vs black hat and wish to proceed with the development of my online presence in an ethical way growing organically. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | kembosabe0 -
Duplicate Page content | What to do?
Hello Guys, I have some duplicate pages detected by MOZ. Most of the URL´s are from a registracion process for users, so the URL´s are all like this: www.exemple.com/user/login?destination=node/125%23comment-form What should I do? Add this to robot txt? If so how? Whats the command to add in Google Webmaster? Thanks in advance! Pedro Pereira
On-Page Optimization | | Kalitenko20140 -
Index Page Content
Mozers, I am of the believe and as a person who puts the utmost emphasis on the index page of any website I am trying to rank, especially with a new domain ... insuring content is relevant, structured, optimized and we have some link juice flowing in. I find once we get the index page ranked, Google's little bots then start to index and rank accordingly the rest of the website ... and we start producing results. We also develop websites (dare I say its where we expertise in) and unexpectantly the client has asked us to carry out SEO work additionally to their web development. Problem lies here, their index page, has absolutely no written content at all, just one large image with a logo (Fashion Website) ...Which I identify as a huge issue as per my explanation is paragraphs one or two. I am sure withe the many more qualified SEO experts and gurus within the SEOmoz community, you have also come across this issue So a few questions, if you don't mind adding advice. 1 - Am I putting too much emphasize on content within the index page, in terms of indexing and actually ranking ...yes I appreciate that terms within the website will be ranked against other pages other than the index page, but will it harm us for having no content at all within the index page 2 - If so, and yes is the answer to above, how do we handle it, we have spoke with the client and he is pretty adamant that he want the index page as is, he has been through out the whole website building process. As suggested, any advice would be really appreciated, its a difficult market to rank within a it is, and i can only see this index page making the task a lot more difficult Cheers John
On-Page Optimization | | Johnny4B0 -
Duplicate content from category pages?
I have an ecommerce store with different categories for my products. Some products do appear in more than one category, is that an issue even if you end up on the same product page/link? Also, I have a "show all products" category, which I believe creates duplicate content too? What is your take on this? What can I do to solve this? Is it even an issue of duplicate content? All answers are very much appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | danielpett0 -
Wordpress SEo Plug In
Hi, I am researching SEO plug ins for Wordpress - WordpressSEO by Yoast and All-In-One SEO Pack - and I have a question about implementation: In general, what is the impact these plug ins have on blogs with a large archives? Will they make any changes to old posts that may break incoming links or require me to go back and make edits to each of the old posts? Also, the main thing I want to do is allow for custom total tags. Is there another way to get this functionality? Or should I stick with a plug in because of all the other SEO benefits? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | AmyLB0 -
Prevent indexing of dynamic content
Hi folks! I discovered bit of an issue with a client's site. Primarily, the site consists of static html pages, however, within one page (a car photo gallery), a line of php coding: dynamically generates a 100 or so pages comprising the photo gallery - all with the same page title and meta description. The photo gallery script resides in the /gallery folder, which I attempted to block via robots.txt - to no avail. My next step will be to include a: within the head section of the html page, but I am wondering if this will stop the bots dead in their tracks or will they still be able to pick-up on the pages generated by the call to the php script residing a bit further down on the page? Dino
On-Page Optimization | | SCW0 -
How do you fix on page SEO ?
I have been trying to push my foundation website in organic search results for competitive keywords , i have been not been so consistent in raking our website in top search results of Google. can some one recommend the guidelines and activities which can really push my websites to Google first page. More Info: about our foundation We are the worlds largest school meal run ngo in the world feeding over 1.3 million school children in India Wesite url www.akshayapatra.org
On-Page Optimization | | AkshayaPatra0 -
Cross Domain Duplicate Content
Hi My client has a series of websies, one main website and several mini websites, articles are created and published daily and weekly, one will go on a the main website and the others on one, two, or three of the mini sites. To combat duplication, i only ever allow one article to be indexed (apply noindex to articles that i don't wanted indexed by google, so, if 3 sites have same article, 2 sites will have noindex tag added to head). I am not completely sure if this is ok, and whether there are any negative affects, apart from the articles tagged as noindex not being indexed. Are there any obvious issues? I am aware of the canonical link rel tag, and know that this can be used on the same domain, but can it be used cross domain, in place of the noindex tag? If so, is it exactly the same in structure as the 'same domain' canonical link rel tag? Thanks Matt
On-Page Optimization | | mattys0