Does turning website content into PDFs for document sharing sites cause duplicate content?

[designquotes]

Website content is 9 tutorials published to unique urls with a contents page linking to each lesson. If I make a PDF version for distribution of document sharing websites, will it create a duplicate content issue? The objective is to get a half decent link, traffic to supplementary opt-in downloads.

[Francisco_Meza]

As far as I know, it can't. But "if" you turned that PDF into a webpage, then yes. I don't think it's something to even worry about.

[EGOL]

.pdf documents are indexed and will compete in the search results along with web pages.  They accumulate pagerank and any links on them are followed and credited the same as a web page.

So, if you have copies of your webpages in pdf format then you should expect them to attract at least some of the traffic that would have gone to your webpage. It is possible for them to rank higher than your webpages - especially if you optimize them by giving them document titles.

I believe that they can lead to duplicate content problems.  I have lots of pdfs on my sites.  To prevent duplicate content problems I have used htaccess to rel=canonical them to the corresponding webpage.