Should I add PDF manuals to my product pages?
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
-
As an irrelevant aside - love that avatar David.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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?"
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Google Search Console issue: "This is how Googlebot saw the page" showing part of page being covered up
Hi everyone! Kind of a weird question here but I'll ask and see if anyone else has seen this: In Google Search Console when I do a fetch and render request for a specific site, the fetch and blocked resources all look A-OK. However, in the render, there's a large grey box (background of navigation) that covers up a significant amount of what is on the page. Attaching a screenshot. You can see the text start peeking out below (had to trim for confidentiality reasons). But behind that block of grey IS text. And text that apparently in the fetch part Googlebot does see and can crawl. My question: is this an issue? Should I be concerned about this visual look? Or no? Never have experienced an issue like that. I will say - trying to make a play at a featured snippet and can't seem to have Google display this page's information, despite it being the first result and the query showing a featured snippet of a result #4. I know that it isn't guaranteed for the #1 result but wonder if this has anything to do with why it isn't showing one. VmIqgFB.png
On-Page Optimization | | ChristianMKG0 -
How do you make product pages unique when there are thousands of products?
When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each? Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail? Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing... Notes: Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page. There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.
On-Page Optimization | | Ria_3 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I am new to the MOZ Pro community. I got the below message for many of my pages. We have a video site so all content in the page except the video link would be different. How can i handle such pages. Can we place adsense AD's on these pages? Duplicate Page Content Code and content on this page looks similar or identical to code and content on other pages on your site. Search engines may not know which pages are best to include in their index and rankings. Common fixes for this issue include 301 redirects, using the rel=canonical tag, and using the Parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Central. For more information on duplicate content, visit http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content. Please help me to know how to handle this.. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Nettv0 -
Where to add new content
I run a vBulletin website and vBulletin isnt very SEO friendly. I do fairly well in Google for most of my keywords, but forums dont necessarily build strong page authority etc. My site deals with fishing reports across the state of VA and drives 15-18k sessions a month and close to 100,000 page views a month based on Google Analytics. I want to start targeting new keywords and I am concerned about vBulletin inability to be SEO friendly. Many of my new keywords arent dynamic like fishing reports that are added by members daily. These are more like campgrounds, marinas etc. My thought is to install a Wordpress blog and build out this content so I can efficiently deal with on page SEO. the vBulletin software is installed in the root so I would install wordpress in something like mydomain/lake123/ Is the right thing to do, and will google see multiple sitemaps (one for vbulletin and another for wordpress) and index appropriately? Am I missing something major here? Thanks ~ Brian
On-Page Optimization | | FCBCO0 -
Duplicate page
Just getting started and had a question regarding one of the reports. It is telling me that I have duplicate pages but I'm not sure how to resolve that.
On-Page Optimization | | KeylimeSocial0 -
On page optimisation reports
Hello, How do I configure these reports to check my landing pages, rather than just my home page? Thanks, Bilal
On-Page Optimization | | PLP0 -
Can I add a blog to different pages of my site?
I would like to ad a blog to a few different pages of my site, is this possible? I would prefer it to not be a stand alone blog, because I am pretty sure it would begin to outrank my landing pages in search results. I built my site using dreamweaver, but I have seen a reference somewhere to a utility for adding a word press blog to an existing site? This site seems to be doing what I had in mind? http://www.drynclean.com/
On-Page Optimization | | ayetti0