DO outbound links to manufacture specs, pdfs help or hurt SEO?

[Jamesmcd03]

I am creating an e-commerce site.

All the products have product certification documents/images, PDF docs for instructions, manufacture specs, etc.

Should I host all this content or simply link to the original documents and content? What is the best for SEO?

Thank you,

[Jamesmcd03]

Thanks for the response.

Sorry for the dumb questions --  If I have a bunch of PDF's, why is this useful?

Does this allow Google to crawl them and I get the SEO juice?

[Jamesmcd03]

Can google crawl attachments for keywords? (PDFs, photos, etc)

Lots of manufactures only host links to PDF.

If possible I want to either copy and paste that content on my site so it gets crawled and I get the SEO juice. Will this work?

[Chris.Menke]

The line is in the ratio of your duplicate content to unique content. I don't know of any hard and fast ratio rule but it is primarily the unique content that will be most helpful as you to build your site's authority against your keyword competitors.

[Jamesmcd03]

Assuming this is OK with suppliers is there any tactics to take that content and get it to help my SEO?

Eg. Copy the PDF words, put it on my own PDF branding and re upload or just take that offline content and paste into my page?

Where is the line between duplicate and unique content?

Thank you!

[seoman10]

Assuming it's useful and relevant Google will like that and so will your users

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

You could also host PDFs as embeds. This snippet I found the other day deemed pretty useful:

<object data="/pdf/sample-3pp.pdf#page=2" type="application/pdf" width="100%" height="100%">Example fallback content: This browser does not support PDFs. Please download the PDF to view it: Download PDF.</object>

[EGOL]

I agree with all of Chris's suggestions.

In some situations, you will see that the information for a few popular products is being heavily used.  In those situations it may be helpful to create your own content.

You may have a situations where your product knowledge, customer knowledge, content creating ability, ambition, and willingness to invest in your website greatly exceeds that of the manufacturer and all other competitors.  In these situations, you have the opportunity to create the best site on the web for a consumer topic or product line.

The investment above is most valuable when you have a product with broad appeal and where its use requires special knowledge or skill that you have the ability to present on a website.  It is also important to consider the expected consumer lifetime of the product (not the item), because that determines if you are producing content that will be of temporary or evergreen value.

[Chris.Menke]

Hi James,

It may help your site as far as engagement numbers if your visitors frequent those documents but the fact that it's duplicate won't be lost on Google.  If you think it will benefit visitors by having it on your site, you could canonicalize it so at least it references the original from your site.