Print Button Creating Duplicate PDF URLs set to NoIndex, OK for SEO?

[Kingalan1]

Our real estate website has 400 listings. We have added a button that allows the visitor to print listing pages in the for.m of a PDF.

The PDF exists as a URL ending in ?print=17076. This print URL is set to noindex and follow.

So our site has 400 additional URLs. Is this a negative for SEO? Or neutral?

I have read it using CSS it is possible to set up printing without creating all these extra URLs. Is this method better from an SEO perspective?

Thanks,

Alan

[OlegKorneitchouk]

best not to generate a new url to follow. ideally, css / js would replace the url change functionality.

if you must generate the print page with a ?print variable, block it via robots.txt (Disallow: /?print= ) so that those pages aren't even crawled (having a noindex tag allows them to be crawled, just not indexed in search results)

[Kingalan1]

Hi Oleg:

Thanks for your response!!

My preference would be to avoid any unnecessary URLs. But I am a business owner and not a coder.

My programmer believes that setting these pages to noindex is sufficient. They cite: https://blog.seoprofiler.com/google-noindexfollow-noindexnofollow-long-run/ [^]

Do you think that adding css/js a time consuming operation to replace the print pages?

Thanks,

Alan

[OlegKorneitchouk]

yea, wouldn't spend too much time recoding that then. i would still block the print pages via robots.txt so that they aren't crawled at all.