Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
-
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it.
We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process.
However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents.
Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties?
Thanks in advance.
-
It looks like Google is not crawling tabs anymore, therefore if your pdf's are tabbed within pages, it might not be an issue: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html
-
Sure, I understand - thanks EGOL
-
I would like to give that to you but it is on a site that I don't share in forums. Sorry.
-
Thanks EGOL
That would be ideal.
For a site that has multiple authors and with it being impractical to get a developer involved every time a web page / blog post and the pdf are created, is there a single line of code that could be used to accomplish this in .htaccess?
If so, would you be able to show me an example please?
-
I assigned rel=canonical to my PDFs using htaccess.
Then, if anyone links to the PDFs the linkvalue gets passed to the webpage.
-
Hi all
I've been discussing the topic of making content available as both blog posts and pdf downloads today.
Given that there is a lot of uncertainty and complexity around this issue of potential duplication, my plan is to house all the pdfs in a folder that we block with robots.txt
Anyone agree / disagree with this approach?
-
Unfortunately, there's no great way to have it both ways. If you want these pages to get indexed for the links, then they're potential duplicates. If Google filters them out, the links probably won't count. Worst case, it could cause Panda-scale problems. Honestly, I suspect the link value is minimal and outweighed by the risk, but it depends quite a bit on the scope of what you're doing and the general link profile of the site.
-
I think you can set it to public or private (logged-in only) and even put a price-tag on it if you want. So yes setting it to private would help to eliminate the dup content issue, but it would also hide the links that I'm using to link-build.
I would imagine that since this guide would link back to our original site that it would be no different than if someone were to copy the content from our site and link back to us with it, thus crediting us as the original source. Especially if we ensure to index it through GWMT before submitting to other platforms. Any good resources that delve into that?
-
Potentially, but I'm honestly not sure how Scrid's pages are indexed. Don't you need to log in or something to actually see the content on Scribd?
-
What about this instance:
(A) I made an "ultimate guide to X" and posted it on my site as individual HTML pages for each chapter
(B) I made a PDF version with the exact same content that people can download directly from the site
(C) I uploaded the PDF to sites like Scribd.com to help distribute it further, and build links with the links that are embedded in the PDF.
Would those all be dup content? Is (C) recommended or not?
-
Thanks!. I am going to look into this. I'll let you know if I learn anything.
-
If they duplicate your main content, I think the header-level canonical may be a good way to go. For the syndication scenario, it's tough, because then you're knocking those PDFs out of the rankings, potentially, in favor of someone else's content.
Honestly, I've seen very few people deal with canonicalization for PDFs, and even those cases were small or obvious (like a page with the exact same content being outranked by the duplicate PDF). It's kind of uncharted territory.
-
Thanks for all of your input Dr. Pete. The example that you use is almost exactly what I have - hundreds of .pdfs on a fifty page site. These .pdfs rank well in the SERPs, accumulate pagerank, and pass traffic and link value back to the main site through links embedded within the .pdf. The also have natural links from other domains. I don't want to block them or nofollow them butyour suggestion of using header directive sounds pretty good.
-
Oh, sorry - so these PDFs aren't duplicates with your own web/HTML content so much as duplicates with the same PDFs on other websites?
That's more like a syndication situation. It is possible that, if enough people post these PDFs, you could run into trouble, but I've never seen that. More likely, your versions just wouldn't rank. Theoretically, you could use the header-level canonical tag cross-domain, but I've honestly never seen that tested.
If you're talking about a handful of PDFs, they're a small percentage of your overall indexed content, and that content is unique, I wouldn't worry too much. If you're talking about 100s of PDFs on a 50-page website, then I'd control it. Unfortunately, at that point, you'd probably have to put the PDFs in a folder and outright block it. You'd remove the risk, but you'd stop ranking on those PDFs as well.
-
@EGOL: Can you expend a bit on your Author suggestion?
I was wondering if there is a way to do rel=author for a pdf document. I don't know how to do it and don't know if it is possible.
-
To make sure I understand what I'm reading:
- PDFs don't usually rank as well as regular pages (although it is possible)
- It is possible to configure a canonical tag on a PDF
My concern isn't that our PDFs may outrank the original content but rather getting slammed by Google for publishing them.
Am right in thinking a canonical tag prevents to accumulate link juice? If so I would prefer to not use it, unless it leads to Google slamming.
Any one has experienced Google retribution for publishing PDF coming from a 3rd party?
@EGOL: Can you expend a bit on your Author suggestion?
Thanks all!
-
I think it's possible, but I've only seen it in cases that are a bit hard to disentangle. For example, I've seen a PDF outrank a duplicate piece of regular content when the regular content had other issues (including massive duplication with other, regular content). My gut feeling is that it's unusual.
If you're concerned about it, you can canonicalize PDFs with the header-level canonical directive. It's a bit more technically complex than the standard HTML canonical tag:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html
I'm going to mark this as "Discussion", just in case anyone else has seen real-world examples.
-
I am really interested in hearing what others have to say about this.
I know that .pdfs can be very valuable content. They can be optimized, they rank in the SERPs, they accumulate PR and they can pass linkvalue. So, to me it would be a mistake to block them from the index...
However, I see your point about dupe content... they could also be thin content. Will panda whack you for thin and dupes in your PDFs?
How can canonical be used... what about author?
Anybody know anything about this?
-
Just like any other piece of duplicate content, you can use canonical link elements to specify the original piece of content (if there's indeed more than one identical piece). You could also block these types of files in the robots.txt, or use noindex-follow meta tags.
Regards,
Margarita
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
-
Getting rid of duplicate content remaining from old misconfiguration
Hi Friends,We have recently (about a month ago) launched a new website, and during the review of that site spotted a serious misconfiguration of our old terrible WP siteThis misconfiguration, which may have come from either sitemaps or internal links or both lead to displaying our french german and english sites on each others’ domains. This should be solved now, but they still show in SERPS: The big question is: What’s the best way to safely remove those from SERPS?We haven’t performed as well as we wanted for a while and we believe this could be one of the issues:Try to search for instance“site:pissup.de stag do -junggesellenabschied” to find english pages on our german domain, each link showing either 301 or 404.This was cleaned to show 301 or 404 when we launched our new site 4 weeks ago, but I can still see the results in SERPS, so I assume they still count negatively?Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pissuptours0 -
Duplicate content across different domains
Hi Guys, Looking for some advice regarding duplicate content across different domains. I have reviewed some previous Q&A on this topic e.g. https://moz.com/community/q/two-different-domains-exact-same-content but just want to confirm if I'm missing anything. Basically, we have a client which has 1 site (call this site A) which has solids rankings. They have decided to build a new site (site B), which contains 50% duplicate pages and content from site A. Our recommendation to them was to make the content on site B as unique as possible but they want to launch asap, so not enough time. They will eventually transfer over to unique content on the website but in the short-term, it will be duplicate content. John Mueller from Google has said several times that there is no duplicate content penalty. So assuming this is correct site A should be fine, no ranking losses. Any disagree with this? Assuming we don't want to leave this to chance or assume John Mueller is correct would the next best thing to do is setup rel canonical tags between site A and site B on the pages with duplicate content? Then once we have unique content ready, execute that content on the site and remove the canonical tags. Any suggestions or advice would be very much appreciated! Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Currently, we manage a site that generates content from a database based on user search criteria such as location or type of business. ..Although we currently rank well -- we created the website based on providing value to the visitor with options for viewing the content - we are concerned about duplicate content issues and if they would apply. For example, the listing that is pulled up for the user upon one search could have the same content as another search but in a different order. Similar to hotels who offer room booking by room type or by rate. Would this dynamically generated content count as duplicate content? The site has done well, but don't want to risk a any future Google penalties caused by duplicate content. Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompucastWeb1 -
Does having a page that ends with ? cause duplicate content?
I am working on a site that has lots of dynamic parameters. So lets say we have www.example.com/page?parameter=1 When the page has no parameters you can still end up at www.example.com/page? Should I redirect this to www.example.com/page/ ? Im not sure if Google ignores this, or if these pages need to be dealt with. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
What constitutes duplicate content?
I have a website that lists various events. There is one particular event at a local swimming pool that occurs every few months -- for example, once in December 2011 and again in March 2012. It will probably happen again sometime in the future too. Each event has its own 'event' page, which includes a description of the event and other details. In the example above the only thing that changes is the date of the event, which is in an H2 tag. I'm getting this as an error in SEO Moz Pro as duplicate content. I could combine these pages, since the vast majority of the content is duplicate, but this will be a lot of work. Any suggestions on a strategy for handling this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChatterBlock0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1