Should I add PDF manuals to my product pages?

[DavidLenehan]

Hello.

A lot of the products I sell on my e-commerce site are very technical. I decided to add PDF data sheets, manuals etc on each of the product pages to improve the customer experience. Now I am not sure if it was the best thing to do.  I have noticed a couple of times that the PDF is out ranking the product page in the SERP.  For a few products, the PDF ranks but the product page doesn't.  Anyone got any ideas?

[DavidLenehan]

I am struggling with the rel="canonical".  If each product had its own product PDF then it would be easy to use the  rel="canonical". However, some of the PDF manuals cover somewhere between 200-300 products. The only difference between some of the products is the physical size (like televisions i.e. 32" vs 37") so the same manual covers all the products within that range.  I am guessing using the same PDF manual for so many products is a duplicate content issue, but sadly they are really useful for users.  Maybe I could put all the pdfs on the product category pages. That said the MOZ tools are showing that we only have 200 duplicate pages out of 250,000, which I think is good.

I agree with Mike, a summary of the PDF, FAQs and how to guides would be an advantage. I've already started adding this information for some of the more popular products but we don't have enough people to write content for every product.  A smaller site would be a lot easier.

Anyone got any ideas?

@Dave - thanks mate

[EGOL]

Keep in mind that many shopping carts have "buy buttons" and "purchase links" that can be embedded in .pdf documents and will deliver the visitor (and the item) into the shopping cart when clicked.

[BeanstalkIM]

As an irrelevant aside - love that avatar David.

[BeanstalkIM]

I agree with Mike here.

While technically the canonical might do what you want (kind of) this isn't what it's intended for.  Another side to that coin is, if you funnel the strength to the product page from the PDF but the product page doesn't have the content that the PDF was ranking for then you still won't get the rankings on the product page and on top of that, you'll lose them on the PDFs.

[Kara.Wallace]

Whoa! Those are big PDFs and a lot of products.

If that is the case then I think the only way you could get people to link to your actual webpages vs the PDFs would be to offer them 1) a summary of the PDF 2) frequently asked questions about the product 3) how-tos not covered in the PDFs or something.

As far as the canonical idea, that is not really what that tag is used for according to Google - 
"Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?

Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).

For instance, if a site has a set of pages for the same model of dance shoe, each varying only by the color of the shoe pictured, it may make sense to set the page highlighting the most popular color as the canonical version so that Google may be more likely to show that page in search results. However, rel="canonical" would not be appropriate if that same site simply wanted a gel insole page to rank higher than the shoe page."

Mike

[DavidLenehan]

Thanks for advice. In the main, we've tried to add content from the PDF into the product pages but the PDFs are usually 150 pages long and we've got 250,000 products online.  I will try the  canonical idea and see what happens. Cheers for all the answers.

[BeanstalkIM]

Mike - you took the words right out of my mouth and I'm glad I read the replies before answering.

The question shouldn't be, "should I remove the PDFs?" it should be, "What about my PDFs are ranking higher and how do I move that to my product pages?"

[tdawson09]

There are a couple of things you can do that will help your product pages rank better over your pdf pages. You can do a canonical from the pdf to the product page it is referencing, giving your product page the ranking value. You can incorporate your pdf into text (html) on your product page, giving your product page additional, relevant content, thus boasting ranking.

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi David,

This typically happens when your PDFs are full of content people want. I have seen this personally with a previous company I worked with and their spec sheets (it was for a software copy). This is good and bad - good people find your content awesome and are linking to it - bad that your PDFs are ranking vs your pages.

Solution - make your pages better. You could potentially take the content from your PDFs and make a page - this in theory should still compel people to link to you. If your PDFs are massive in size, you could consider condense the contents into a webpage that contains FAQs, a summary of the information, etc.

This isn't a bad problem to have. If you can't beat them, join them - optimize your PDFs for search.

Hope this helps.

Mike