PDF's - Dupe Content

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

I have some pdfs linked to from a page with little content.  Hence thinking best to extract the copy from the pdf and have on-page as body text, and the pdf will still be linked too.  Will this count as dupe content ?

Or is it best to use a pdf plugin so page opens pdf automatically and hence gives page content that way ?

Cheers

Dan

[GPainter]

What would give the user the best experience is the really question,I would;d say put it on page then if the user is lacking a plugin they can still read it, if you have it as a downloadable PDF is shouldn't be able to get crawled and thus avoiding the problem.

Hope that helps.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Chris although i thought PDFS were crawlable??:  http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/01/10/seo-pdfs/

Hence why im worried about dupe content if use content of pdf as body text too OR are you saying should no-follow the link to the pdf if use its content as body text because it is considered dupe content in that scenario ?

Ideally i want both - the copy on it used as body text copy on page and the pdf a linkable download, or page as embed of open pdf via a plugin.

[GPainter]

Hi Dan,

Yes PDFs are crawlable (sorry for confusion!) if you were to put it into say a .zip or .rar (or similar) it wouldn't be crawled or you could no index the link i guess. You would need to stick the PDF (download) behind some thing that couldn't be crawled. You could try rel= canonical but I've never tried it with a PDF so i'm not sure how that would go.

Hope that enlightens you a bit.

[Dan-Lawrence]

thanks Chris

yes you can canonicalise the pdf to the html (according to the comments of that article i just linked to anyway)

[CleverPhD]

That is what I was going to suggest - setting up a canonical in the http header of the PDF back to the article

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

As another option, you can just block access to the PDFs to keep them out of the index as well.

[Dan-Lawrence]

ps - is a pdf to html coverter different from a plugin that loads the pdf as an open page when you click it ? or same thing ?

[CleverPhD]

Should be different, but you would have to look at them to make sure.