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
-
Are Wildcard Subdomain Hurting my SEO?
I have some sites with a lot of categories (category, sub-category, sub-subcategory) and locations (country, state/territory, city). To avoid listing pages really deep in my hierarchy I used wildcard subdomains for the locations, but lately I have been told that might be hurting my overall SEO efforts. I have a lot of URLs like https://city-state-country.example.com on one side of the domain and example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory on the other. In the middle you see stuff like city-state-country.example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. Would I be better off moving the locations to the right side of the domain name? Then you might find stuff like example.com/country/state/city/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. I think I could do the new rewrite rules fairly easily since every country slug is just two characters long.
On-Page Optimization | | PostAlmostAnything0 -
Dynamically populated content
We are developing a website for a school that has 19 campuses divided into 8 districts. Ideally, we would like to have one search page that dynamically populates when people search WHILE on the site. The question is what happens when someone does an organic search, will the search engine populate with the schools in that district. For instance, if i search on Google "Austin Schools", will the Austin district-that does not have a unique URL- show up in a Google search? What the generated page looks like is on this link http://imgur.com/stCQcP6. If yes, any special type of coding we need to add to the backend?
On-Page Optimization | | jgodwin0 -
Category pages - SEO or deindex?
What is the best thing to do with category pages? Should I deindex them or use SEO on them? I use the Thesis theme and the Wordpress SEO plugin. I am just not sure what to do with category pages. Also will they create duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
On-page SEO optimization
hi there! Is it possible not to be in the first 20 or 30 positions in the SERPs after executing onpage SEO actions (keyword optimization, metatags, ....) even for keywords for which there's not "too much" competition? Is there a way of visualize the pages indexed by the google bot? (the pages especifically, not the number) in order to discard indexing problems? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr1 -
Good idea to use hidden text for SEO purposes due to picky clients not allowing additional content?
I do SEO for eCommerce websites both in-house and for clients. A few of our clients want increased rankings but are not willing to allow us to make the changes internally to help make that happen. One of which is adding content to the webpages since 90% of them have very little to none. I have a couple clients that are extremely picky about what can be seen on their eCommerce website. They have the site setup the way they want it but it is not SEO friendly in the slightest. The pages (including homepage) have little to no content, and the only things they want changed are things visitors CANNOT see on the webpages (META, ALT Tags etc). The tactic i am wanting to use is often used by spammers but i have a legitimate reason to use this and wanted to know if this would be a good idea. They are wanting to target fairly competitive keywords but are unwilling to allow any on-page changes to add any information and keywords to help with rankings. I was thinking about adding text behind images or hide the text in whatever ways to prevent the end user from viewing it (except for the search engines). My idea was simply to add a paragraph or two of content for the search engines purely to help in ranking because they have a lot of pages that have zero content except for product image and title listings. Is this tactic recommended or does anyone have any other ideas for these type of situations. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | VITALBGS
Stephen0 -
Footer Content
We currently have footer content contained in a single php include file and is included in every page and contains the following: Most recent 3 tweets from our twitter feed Snippets of our 3 most recent blogs posts navigation links to our main pages (essentially the same as our main navigation in the header) Is this good/bad?
On-Page Optimization | | NeilD0 -
Duplicate content on my domain
I have several pages on my domain that are using the same content except for changing a paragraph or sentence. Do I need to create unique content, even though much of the information pertains to a feature and is related?
On-Page Optimization | | Court_H0 -
What to do with old content in light of the Panda update?
Let's say you operate a laptop review website. After several years, the individual product review URL's (like site.com/dell/xp1234-review/) aren't receiving much traffic, they may have a few links here and there. In general and considering the panda update, would the best option be to 301 the old URL's back to the category page (site.com/dell/)or just keep them where they are? Any potential issues like having excessive 301's which could slow down the site or appear fishy to search engines?
On-Page Optimization | | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0