Rel="canonical" for PFDs?
-
Hello there,
We have a lot of PDFs that seem to end up on other websites. I was wondering if there was a way to make sure that our website gets the credit/authority as the original creator. Besides linking directly from the PDF copy to our pages, is anyone aware of strategy for letting Google know that we are the original publishers?
I know search engines can index HTML versions of PDFs, so is there anyway to get them to index a rel="canonical" tag as well?
Thoughts/Ideas?
-
I stand corrected on that point.
Thank you Jassy for sharing the link. I was not aware Google made that change.
-
I'm not sure that statement about rel canonical only working within your own domain - if you have some test data/similar that shows this to be the case, I'd love to hear about it.
Matt Cutts specifically says that cross-domain rel canonical is supported, see: the webmaster video on: iwww.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA
-
Canonical tags are only effective within your domain. They have no value if someone else was to take your work and share it elsewhere.
A few things you can do to establish yourself as the original content creator:
-
publish it first on your site. Wait until you see your content in Google before actively distributing the pdf to others. This would be one indicator that can be used to demonstrate you are the original author.
-
as you shared, ensure there are links back to your site within the PDF. This would be another good indicator to Google that you are the content creator.
-
lock the PDF so changes cannot be made to the content.
-
Earlier today Google announced the new schema.org microdata offers an author tag so you can determine the original author. That system has been tested and is available to use now.
-
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
-
Will this URL structure: "domain.com/s/content-title" cause problems?
Hey all, We have a new in-house built too for building content. The problem is it inserts a letter directly after the domain automatically. The content we build with these pages aren't all related, so we could end up with a bunch of urls like this: domain.com/s/some-calculator
Technical SEO | | joshuaboyd
domain.com/s/some-infographic
domain.com/s/some-long-form-blog-post
domain.com/s/some-product-page Could this cause any significant issues down the line?0 -
How google bot see's two the same rel canonicals?
Hi, I have a website where all the original URL's have a rel canonical back to themselves. This is kinda like a fail safe mode. It is because if a parameter occurs, then the URL with the parameter will have a canonical back to the original URL. For example this url: https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ has this canonical: https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ which is the same since it's an original URL This url https://www.example.com/something/page/1/?parameter has this canonical https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ like i said before, parameters have a rel canonical back to their original url's. SO: https://www.example.com/something/page/1/?parameter and this https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ both have the same canonical which is this https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ Im telling you all that because when roger bot tried to crawl my website, it gave back duplicates. This happened because it was reading the canonical (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/) of the original url (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/) and the canonical (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/) of the url with the parameter (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/?parameter) and saw that both were point to the same canonical (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/)... So, i would like to know if google bot treats canonicals the same way. Because if it does then im full of duplicates 😄 thanks.
Technical SEO | | dos06590 -
Many "spin-off" sites - 301 or 401/410?
Hi there, I've just started a new job with a rental car company with locations all over New Zealand and Australia. I've discovered that we have several websites along the lines of "rentalcarsnewzealand", "bigsaverentals" etc that are all essentially clones of our primary site. I'm assuming that these were set up as some sort of "interesting" SEO attempt. I want to get rid of them, as they create customer experience issues and they're not getting a hell of a lot of traffic (or driving bookings) anyway. I was going to just 301 them all to our homepage - is this the right approach? Several of the sites are indexed by Google and they've been linked up to a number of sites - the 301 move wouldn't be to try to derive any linkjuice or anything of that nature, but simply to get people to our main site if they do find themselves clicking a link to one of those sites. Thanks very much for your advice! Nicole
Technical SEO | | AceRentalCars0 -
"Items 1 - 24 of 75" Appearing in Meta Description - How Do I Remove It?
Hey guys, I've noticed that the item count is appearing at the beginning of the meta description for our brand pages, e.g. "Items 1 - 24 of 75 -". The issue I have with this is that it reduces the character limit (due to truncation), consequently leaving me with little room to play with to include more useful information. Is there a way to remove this? Cheers, A
Technical SEO | | RobTucker0 -
Rel="next"
Hi I was just wondering if there is any difference in using rel='next' rather than rel="next". Would it still work the same way? I mean using the apostrophes differently, would it matter? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | pikka0 -
Implementation of rel="next" & rel="prev"
Hi All, I'm looking to implement rel="next" & rel="prev", so I've been looking for examples. I looked at the source code for the MOZ.com forum, if anyone one is going to do it properly MOZ are. I noticed that the rel="next" & rel="prev" tags have been implemented in the a href tags that link to the previous and next pages rather than in the head. I'm assuming this is fine with Google but in their documentation they state to put the tags in the . Does it matter? Neil.
Technical SEO | | NDAY0 -
Incorrect rel canonical , impacts ?
Incorrect use of canonical code.. and why have they used the strange code surrounding it. Hi there seo guys, I need some help.. a site I am working on has used the rel canonical tag incorrectly. they have used the code on the cannon page not on the duplicate pages.. there is also some other strange code with it. I will show and hide the url.. However I wanted to know if this would stop google bots crawling this page correctly as they dont seem to rank very well either.. here is the code:
Technical SEO | | ibusmedia0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0