Would a free PDF download diminish SEO benefits of HTML content?
-
Hello,
I am doing SEO for a company that, as a sideline business, sells four books written by the principals; the content is directly relevant to the company's primary business focus. Book sales are a tiny fraction of our overall revenue, and we don't expect that to change, although we will continue to sell the books.
In addition to selling them, we have decided to convert the books to HTML and post them for free on our website (laid out by chapter and section). The hope is that this will result in goodwill, links, traffic, and ultimately improved search rankings.
My question: Would offering free PDF downloads of the books (in addition to posting the HTML content) diminish the SEO benefits of the HTML content?
- If we don't offer the PDF option, people would have to visit our site to read the content (unless they bought a hard copy).
- If visitors were able to download a free PDF, they wouldn't need to return to our site to read it.
- If our corporate clients (nearly all of our clients are corporations) could download a PDF, they could then post it on an intranet instead of posting a link to our site.
- In general, do you think a visitor would be less likely to link to our site if he or she were able to download the PDF? Or would the appeal of the PDF option make it more likely that people would visit and link to the site?
- Also, if we offer the PDF option, are there any SEO issues related to duplicate content?
- Finally, if we did offer the free PDF download, would you recommend that we ask for an email address before giving the PDF?
Thank you very much!
-
Okay, thanks.
-
I make nice money from ads on html pages. And, if you have ten chapters that each focus on a different keyword, then you have ten html pages in the SERPs with great optimization instead of one PDF with generalized optimization. And when people land they look at many pages, often all ten. Each of these earns ad impressions. I am publishing for ad revenue.
-
Thank you, Alex!
-
Thank you, EGOL!
Do you think there is any reason to consider offering PDFs and not posting the HTML versions? Or do you prefer the approach of having the HTML and also offering PDFs?
-
You can add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs to avoid any duplicate content problems: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers
If you think these PDFs are really valuable, and e-mail addresses will be useful to you, then yes - you should ask for an e-mail address to download them. If you don't take that route and they're indexed as part of your website, make sure you have a few links to your websites within the PDFs so you get some value if people rehost them.
Make sure your branding and website is obvious on the PDFs whatever you do.
-
There are many ways to handle this.
I have sites with lots of free pdf documents. Each of those documents contains content that is not on the website. Lots of people visit and print them. Lots of people link to them. When they are printed our branding is prominently displayed so that people can return for our site to get other similar documents. We also have one or more links in those pdf documents so any links into them pass value into our website. If someone else posts them on their domain the links again point to our website. In addition, the properties of the pdf documents are edited to give them a title tag that will be visible in the SERPs and help them rank better.
It is possible to monetize pdf documents. You can rent/sell adspace within them that can be linked or not be linked. Many shopping carts allow you to produce "add to cart" buttons. These can be configured to work within pdf documents.
A friend of mine has a situation like yours. He has a collection of webpages that are each chapters of a single topic document that he also has in a pdf document with many pages. People can view the html pages on his site for free (they are monetized by ads). Or, they can purchase the pdf. The pdf allows them to print the document, search the entire document, view it offline or conveniently page through it linearly. He has many of these pdf documents and even though people can view the same content free on his website many of them purchase these pdfs for the print/search/scroll/use-offline abilities. He makes nice money from selling these pdf documents.
-
If we don't offer the PDF option, people would have to visit our site to read the content (unless they bought a hard copy).
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF -
if visitors were able to download a free PDF, they wouldn't need to return to our site to read it.
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF
- If our corporate clients (nearly all of our clients are corporations) could download a PDF, they could then post it on an intranet instead of posting a link to our site.
MAKE 'EM PAY FOR THE PDF
- In general, do you think a visitor would be less likely to link to our site if he or she were able to download the PDF? Or would the appeal of the PDF option make it more likely that people would visit and link to the site?
MOST PEOPLE WILL NOT LINK. ONLY PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SAY... "GET SOMETHING AWESOME HERE". THE PROBLEM IS THAT THEY WILL LINK TO THE PDF BUT IF YOU HAVE LINKS IN THE PDF THEN YOUR WEBSITE WILL GET SOME BENEFIT. BUT I WOULD BE SELLING THIS PDF.
- Also, if we offer the PDF option, are there any SEO issues related to duplicate content?
IF YOU HAVE 500 WORDS ON AN HTML PAGE AND THE SAME 500 WORDS IN A PDF THEN YOU MIGHT HAVE A PROBLEM. BUT IF YOU HAVE 50 PAGES EACH OF 500 WORDS ON THE WEBSITE AND 25000 WORDS IN ONE PDF DOCUMENT THEN THERE SHOULD BE NO PROBLEM. BUT IF YOU SELL THE PDF THAT CONCERN IS ELIMINATED.
- Finally, if we did offer the free PDF download, would you recommend that we ask for an email address before giving the PDF?
IS GETTING THE EMAIL ADDRESSES A GOAL? IF THAT IS WHY YOU ARE DOING THIS THEN, YES, ASK FOR IT, AND REQUIRING THE EMAIL IN ADVANCE SUGGESTS THAT THE PDF WILL NOT BE INDEXED WHERE IT CAN BE LINKED TO OR HAVE ANY CHANCE OF BEING A DUPE CONTENT PROBLEM. I WOULD BE SELLING THE PDF.
-
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
-
SEO question
why does a business rank differ on google search and google maps (for example, a hair salon we do seo for ranks 5th for "hair salon in Dublin" on Google Maps and ranks 10th on Google search)
On-Page Optimization | | ryan.mamma0 -
Dynamically populated content
We are developing a website for a school that has 19 campuses divided into 8 districts. Ideally, we would like to have one search page that dynamically populates when people search WHILE on the site. The question is what happens when someone does an organic search, will the search engine populate with the schools in that district. For instance, if i search on Google "Austin Schools", will the Austin district-that does not have a unique URL- show up in a Google search? What the generated page looks like is on this link http://imgur.com/stCQcP6. If yes, any special type of coding we need to add to the backend?
On-Page Optimization | | jgodwin0 -
Page title contents
In my page title, I have my product name. Is it beneficial to also include another keyword like: Buy wedding dress online Australia: e..g. (page title) amelie wedding dress | buy wedding dress online Australia. Or is it better just using: Amelie wedding dress
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Seo for company services page?
I am creating a site for a Dentist with 30 pages of services in a mega menu. Other than the actual pages should there be a central page with all the services on it hyper linking to each one? Thanks Scott
On-Page Optimization | | scott3150 -
Duplicate Page content | What to do?
Hello Guys, I have some duplicate pages detected by MOZ. Most of the URL´s are from a registracion process for users, so the URL´s are all like this: www.exemple.com/user/login?destination=node/125%23comment-form What should I do? Add this to robot txt? If so how? Whats the command to add in Google Webmaster? Thanks in advance! Pedro Pereira
On-Page Optimization | | Kalitenko20140 -
Duplicate content list by SEOMOZ
Hi Friends, I am seeing lot of duplicate (about 10%) from the crawl report of SEOMOZ. The report says, "Duplicate Page Content" But the urls it listed have different title, different url and also different content. I am not sure how to fix this issue.. My site has both Indian cinema news and photo gallery. The problme mainly coming in photo gallery posts. for example: this is the main url of a post. apgossips.com/2012/12/18/telugu-actress-poonam-kaur-photos . But in this post, each image is a link to its enlarged images (default wordpress). The problem is coming with each individual image with in this post. examples of SEOMOZ report 3 individual urls as duplicate content...from the same above post.: http://apgossips.com/2012/12/18/telugu-actress-poonam-kaur-photos/poonam-kaur-hot-photo-shoot-stills-4 http://apgossips.com/2012/12/18/telugu-actress-poonam-kaur-photos/poonam-kaur-hot-photo-shoot-stills-3 http://apgossips.com/2012/12/18/telugu-actress-poonam-kaur-photos/poonam-kaur-hot-photo-shoot-stills-2 Some body please advise me.. Appreciate your help.
On-Page Optimization | | ksnath0 -
An ecomerce seo question
Looking for a few opinions on this please...Trying to reduce the number of pages I have to seo to rank on my websites and at the same time avoid the google over optimisation issues. Previously on our ecomerce websites we would have a category page for, say, 12 times, we would then seo that page for generic terms related to the page; ie, blue dress, cheap blue dress, blue party dress etc. The individual product pages would then be seoed with the title and h1 tags containing the exact product name and the url containing the product name too. This worked fine but we are suffering from some duplicate content issues of late (the products are mixture of few unique items and probably 95% imported affiliate datafeeds) as we have an average of 80,000 products per store we have neither the time nor the staff to rewrite everything (the products update daily directly from the merchants so would need to be done daily) What we are planning on moving toward is blocking the individual product pages from Google and instead putting all efforts into the category pages. The category page will contain plenty of quality unique content related to the category so the only duplicate content would be a line of the product name and price. Whilst we would still rank the category page for broad keywords we also would like to now rank the category page for 16 individual product names as there is a good profit to make made by the sheer volume of product names we plan on ranking for. Obviously we could not get all the products into the url and the page title as that would be silly but would it be acceptable to have multiple h2 tags on the page, each with a different entry, the product names (H1 will be saved for the category name). We can easily bold these keywords to help in the optimisation as per the seo moz onsite analysis tool and we can add image text to ensure the product name is featured at least twice on the page. As so few sites actually seo for the long tail product names, most retailers rank by virtue of their domain quality alone, our onsite seo doesn't have to be 100% but getting the best we can out of the page will help the efforts. Many thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Number of characters to duplicate content
I wonder how much characters in a page title so it can be characterized for Googleas duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | imoveiscamposdojordao
Sorry for the English, I used Google Translator.
I'm from Brazil 😄
Thanks.0