How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?

[BeytzNet]

Hi All,

I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product.

Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a>

<a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice?

Thanks</a>

[AndrewAkesson]

Are the PDF's currently being crawled and indexed?

If you want to hide the PDF's from search engines, and preserve link juice, then a javascript method like you've mentioned ought to keep things wrapped up.

You could also consider some data capture, such as requiring an e-mail address to be entered before you see the download link.

[BeytzNet]

Due to your answer I checked and I see that some of the PDF's are indexed.

I didn't know that Google does that.
It is probably from the time that the links were not "nofollow".

Should I exclude them using robots.txt?

[AndrewAkesson]

Are you just trying to streamline your product pages, or are you experiencing a specific issue with your product pages that you're hoping this will solve?

Linking to the PDF's via a javascript function should help preserve link juice and crawl budget.

You should only add those PDF's that have been indexed to the robots.txt if you absolutely do not want them in the index, otherwise it won't really do anything to help.

[BeytzNet]

I don't think having them indexed would do me any good.

The important page is the product page itself - the way I see it, there is no good reason to lose link juice for these guides...

I'm trying to improve my sites overall performance.

Important note...

Also, I have some cases where the manuals are pages on the manufacturer's site. Should I change these links from follow to JS links in order not to lose the juice from my site to other sites?

[EGOL]

Just saying what I would do if this was my website.

My employees would be told that getting that pdf data onto the product sales page is a top priority job... and I would call the car dealer and order my new Jaguar.

[BeytzNet]

Dear Egol,

Thank for the reply. I'm guessing my example for product guides was not exact.
These are not guides but rather certificates of authentication which the customers expect to see. Some I have in PDF's, some in JPG's and some I refer to a cetificate page in another site. The question is what to do...

I currently use "nofollow" links on all types of certificates (jpg, pdf and links to other site). What do you suggest to do?

I was considering either window.open (which I fear would look spammy) or leaving it as is...

Thanks

[EGOL]

Thanks,

I was assuming that these had product dimensions, how to use, etc information.  I would want all of that content on my site.

If these are certificates then I would link to them as .jpg images and that eliminates concerns about link juice.

[BeytzNet]

Dear Egol,

I'm assuming by your answer that PDF's take link juice and JPG's don't (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Is that the case even if I have <a href="">to enlarge the image? (I use href with JQuery and not regular target=_blank)</a>

<a href="">Also, what to do about the certificates that are on other sites? (too many and rapidly changing for me to get it to my site)</a>