Title missing or empty on non-html downloadable files?

[CNCCookbook]

My site, www.cnccookbook.com, has lots of links for downloading files.  These files are not html and they don't have .htm or .html extensions.  So why does SEOMoz flag them for missing titles?  Is there some other way these files should be handled for better SEO?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Robert,

The SEOmoz crawler is set to ignore title tags on certain non-html files, such as pdfs. That said, there are still some errant file extensions out there that it will attempt to read. These are rare, but it does happen.

From an SEO point of view, there's nothing you really need to do with these files. If you wanted, you could place a rel="nofollow" on any link that you didn't want robots to crawl, or block them with robots.txt, just to be sure. But from a search point of view, Google and the other engines are pretty sophisticated with these types of files so this is probably unnecessary.

As a side note, Google is getting increasingly good at reading some types of non-html files, like pdfs, so it's often advantages to have these indexed.

If you are seeing errors in your campaign caused by these files, feel free to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org) and let them know.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

[AlanMosley]

I am not sure about SEOMoz, but other tools report this if the link is broken, once they can read the file they then work out it does not need a title.