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
-
Please help - Duplicate Content
Hi, I am really struggling to understand why my site has a lot of duplicate content issues. It's flagging up as ridiculously high and I have no idea how to fix this, can anyone help me, please? Website is www.firstcapitol.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alix_SEO1 -
Query based site; duplicate content; seo juice flow.
Hi guys, We're planning on starting a Saas based service where we'll be selling different skins. Let's say WordPress themes, though it's not about that. Say we have an url called site.com/ and we would like to direct all seo juice to the mother landing page /best-wp-themes/ but then have that juice flow towards our additional pages: /best-wp-themes/?id=Mozify
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andy.bigbangthemes
/best-wp-themes/?id=Fiximoz /best-wp-themes/?id=Mozicom Challenges: 1. our content would be formatted like this:
a. Same content - features b. Same content - price c. Different content - each theme will have its own set of features / design specs. d. Same content - testimonials. How would be go about not being penalised by SE's for the duplicate content, but still have the /?id=whatever pages be indexed with proper content? 2. How do we go about making sure SEO juice flows to the /?id pages too?Basically it's the same thing with different skins. Thanks for the help!0 -
Will we be penalised for duplicate content on a sub-domain?
Hi there, I run a WordPress blog and I use [community platform] Discourse for commenting. When we publish a post to Wordpress, a duplicate of that post is pushed to a topic on Discourse, which is on a sub-domain. Eg: The original post and the duplicated post. Will we be penalised for duplicating our own content on a subdomain? If so, other than using an excerpt, what are our options? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ILOVETHEHAWK0 -
How to handle duplicate content with Bible verses
Have a friend that does a site with bible verses and different peoples thoughts or feelings on them. Since I'm an SEO he came to me with questions and duplicate content red flag popped up in my head. My clients all generate their own content so not familiar with this world. Since Bible verses appear all over the place, is there a way to address this from an SEO standpoint to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Potential Pagination Issue/ Duplicate content issue
Hi All, We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing. We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?.. Any advice would be greatly appreciated? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Is there a downside of an image coming from the site's dotted quad and can it be seen as a duplicate?
Ok the question doesn't fully explain the issue. I just want some opinions on this. Here is the backstory. I have a client with a domain that has been around for a while and was doing well but with no backlinks. (Fairly low competition). For some reason they created mirrors of their site on different urls. Then their web designer built them a test site that was a copy of their site on the web designer's url and didn't bother to noindex it. Client's site dived, the web designer's site started ranking for their keywords. So we helped clean that up, and they hired a brand new web designer and redesigned the site. For some reason the dotted quad version of the site started showing up as a referer in GA. So one image on the site comes from that and not the site's url. So I ran a copyscape and site search and discovered the dotted quad version like 69.64.153.116 (not the actual address) was also being indexed by the search engine. To us this seems like a cut and dry duplicate content issue, but I'm having trouble finding much written on the subject. I raised the issue with the dev, and he reluctantly 301 the site to the official url. The second part of this is the web designer still has that one image on the site coming from the numerical version of the site and not the written url. Any thoughts if that has any negative SEO impact? My thought it isn't ideal, but it just looks like an external referral for pulling that one image. I'd love any thoughts or experience on a situation like this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Duplicate content in Webmaster tools, is this bad?
We launched a new site, and we did a 301 redirect to every page. I have over 5k duplicate meta tags and title tags. It shows the old page and the new page as having the same title tag and meta description. This isn't true, we changed the titles and meta description, but it still shows up like that. What would cause that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0