I see, thanks! I think it's important not to have the ecommerce navigation on the page promoting the pdf. What would you say is ideal as far as the graphical and navigation components of the page with the PDF on it - what kind of navigation and graphical header should I have on it?

Thanks for the code Marcus.

Actually, the pdf is what people will be linking to. It's a guide for websites. I think the PDF will be much easier to promote than the article.I assume so anyway.

Is there a way to make sure my canonical code in htaccess is working after I insert the code?

Thanks again,

Bob

Thanks ThompsonPaul,

Say the pdf is located at

domain.com/pdfs/white-papers.pdf

and the article that I want to rank is at

domain.com/articles/article.html

do I simply add this to my htaccess file?:

Header add Link "<http: www.domain.com="" articles="" article.html="">; rel="canonical""</http:>

Can I just use htaccess?

See here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

We only have one pdf like this right now and we plan to have no more than five.

Say the pdf is located at

domain.com/pdfs/white-papers.pdf

and the article that I want to rank is at

domain.com/articles/article.pdf

do I simply add this to my htaccess file?:

Header add Link "<http: www.domain.com="" articles="" article.pdf="">; rel="canonical""</http:>

How do I know if I can do an HTTP header request? I'm using shared hosting through hostgator.

Thank you DoRM,

I assume that the PDF is what I want to be the main version since that is what I'll be marketing, but I could be wrong? What if I get backlinks to both pages, will both sets of backlinks count?

Hello,

We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product.

We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful.

My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content?

Thanks.

Hello,

I was thinking about putting a box down at the bottom of my client's main articles that let's the reader easily copy the html code it takes to link to the article they're reading.  Maybe I'd put it after the author bio.

Do any of you do this?

If so, what format do you use? It has to look nice of course. This is a non-techie industry.

Thanks.