Index pdf files but redirecto to site

[gmellak]

Hi,

One of our clients has tons of PDFs (manuals, etc.) and frequently gets good rankings for the direct PDF link. While we're happy about the PDFs attracting users' attention, we'd like to redirect them to the site where the original PDF link is published and avoid that people open the pdf directly.

In short, we'd like to index the PDFs, but show to users the pdf link within a site - how should we proceed to do that?

Thanks,

GM

[G-Force]

Hi Gert,

Technically, this is not possible unless you use cloaking to display the PDF to the search engines and redirect the users to a different page.

What you could do to avoid cloacking is to include a banner at the top of your PDF with something like "Click here to see all our related PDFs" that would link to your website, this way users might be interested in going to your website.

Otherwise, you could detect the referer with htaccess and redirect the user to the user if he is coming from google, but this might be considered as cloaking. Here's an example :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (.)google.(.)
RewriteRule ^pdf/(.*).pdf /pdf-list [R=302]

If you are running a apache server and you put this in your .htaccess file, the first line activate mod_rewrite, the second line check if the referer matches  anythinggoogle.anything and the third line redirect all .pdf files in the pdf folder to the /pdf-list page if the referer matches.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[gmellak]

Thanks for your detailed reply, Guillaume,

I guess the possible "cloaking troubles" with this strategy are probably too risky for our project. However, I like the "click here" idea, we'll check if we can automate that somehow to drag users reading the PDFs back to our site.

[G-Force]

Hi Gret,

After further research, it might not be considered as cloacking that much as the Google First Click Free for Web Search system works the same way and check the HTTP referer.

For more details, read the official Google Webmaster Central blog post about it here :
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[gmellak]

Thanks for the follow-up ... if it weren't for phrases like

• The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.

I'd be quite comfortable with that ... in the meantime, however, I might try some pdf2html conversion tools to see if there is a viable way to present PDF-information on a HTML page and block the PDF link for robots.

Regards,

Gert