Black Hat or Bulletproof?

[Mike.Bean]

I run a blog and a e-commerce website. Their not connected but their about the same thing. I want to put my blog articles onto my website (just a couple not every last one) but I'm afraid of the duplicate content issues.

Can I take an image of a blog post, make it a PDF, and put it under a category of my e-commerce site which is helping users with useful content.

This sounds like a great idea that Google wouldn't be able to tell the difference, in fact Google would like it and see it as a useful document.

To me this seems to good to be true, perhaps a form of black hat.

So my question is, is it black hat? Could I ever get penalized for doing this?

[Vizergy]

You want to add the content to help your users, right?  You aren't trying to get it indexed, correct?  Just noindex those pages...

[rayvensoft]

Or you can link back to the original article with a rel="cannonical" or if you want to be 100% sure just make it rel="nofollow".

[NakulGoyal]

Is your blog blog.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog/ or yourblogdomain.com ? As Raymond recommended, I would suggest doing a cross domain canonical and you should be good. I hope this helps.

[Mike.Bean]

Seeing how it would be an image and google's crawlers cant crawl the text in that image does it still need to be no follow or canonical?

[Vizergy]

I wouldn't do that.  It would work, but in case your site was ever manually looked at for any reason and that was noticed, that could look like an attempt to manipulate search results and you could get hit.  I would just put it on as text and either noindex the page in your robots.txt file or do as Raymond and Nakul suggest and set up a canonical tag.  In my very humble opinion I think the safest thing would just be to block bots from the page but the canonical isn't a bad suggestion at all.

[TheeDigital]

Wouldn't you still need some supplemental text to go along with the pdf to explain why a visitor should download it? Seems like a lot of extra work converting blogs into pdfs, uploading them, and extra writing work. A link back makes more sense to me.

[Mike.Bean]

It Takes about 2 minutes per post. Print Screen, Crop, Use Acrobat to make the PDF, upload to site, & write a quick paragraph.

[Mike.Bean]

That is what I thought, I was hoping it wouldn't be considered a bad thing to do though. Oh well it is still useful for customers. So making these canonical will not boost my overall website ranking in the least bit?

[Vizergy]

I don't think so, but it will help keep you from dropping.  You are doing it for your users and that is great I just worry if that would not be obvious to Google - that's all.

[KeriMorgret]

Just a quick note -- I've seen Google index PDFs that were scanned images of a cut-and-paste newsletter from the 1980s with a variety of different fonts. This is not a guaranteed way to keep Google out, and images will also make your files much bigger than just text.