John, that's a good question. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, I would hesitate to set up a 301 redirect--you still may see ranking changes if you replaced it with a landing page.

I suspect that the reason why it's ranking is because other sites are linking directly to the PDF file, the content. If you were to remove that PDF, they might stop linking to it.

One option would be to edit the PDF file and make that PDF the landing page (in .pdf format), that would be the same URL.

Myles92, recently (in the past few months, I don't recall specifically when) Google did give some recommendations that included having an html sitemap page on your website. For a good user experience, it is recommended that you have a good navigation structure as well as an "html sitemap". The html sitemap page allows users to see the overall structure of the website, and click through to a certain page or section of the site.

Shawn124, whenever you move from HTTP to HTTPs, you'll need to set up the 301 permanent redirects for pages on the site only. The other elements, such as images, JavaScript (if they're external files), and .CSS files will need to be changed only in the code so that they reference the new HTTPs URLs, and not HTTP.

If you load an HTTP element (such as an image that uses the full URL in it's reference rather than the image filename only) on an HTTPs URL, then the browser will give you an error.  So generally you need to do two things:

• set up 301 Permanent Redirect for the page URLs.

• search the entire website for all references to HTTP and  change them to HTTPs (unless you're linking out to an external site).

If the site is in WordPress, you can use the Search and Replace plugin to replace it all at once in the database.

The best I have ever used is http://www.localsitesubmit.com they hand submit to hundreds of directories.

watch?v=PPfTaDkV6Eo