Rel="canonical" for PFDs?

[Tektronix]

Hello there,

We have a lot of PDFs that seem to end up on other websites. I was wondering if there was a way to make sure that our website gets the credit/authority as the original creator. Besides linking directly from the PDF copy to our pages, is anyone aware of strategy for letting Google know that we are the original publishers?

I know search engines can index HTML versions of PDFs, so is there anyway to get them to index a rel="canonical" tag as well?

Thoughts/Ideas?

[RyanKent]

Canonical tags are only effective within your domain. They have no value if someone else was to take your work and share it elsewhere.

A few things you can do to establish yourself as the original content creator:

• publish it first on your site. Wait until you see your content in Google before actively distributing the pdf to others. This would be one indicator that can be used to demonstrate you are the original author.

• as you shared, ensure there are links back to your site within the PDF. This would be another good indicator to Google that you are the content creator.

• lock the PDF so changes cannot be made to the content.

• Earlier today Google announced the new schema.org microdata offers an author tag so you can determine the original author. That system has been tested and is available to use now.

[JaspalX]

I'm not sure that statement about rel canonical only working within your own domain - if you have some test data/similar that shows this to be the case, I'd love to hear about it.

Matt Cutts specifically says that cross-domain rel canonical is supported, see: the webmaster video on: iwww.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA

[RyanKent]

I stand corrected on that point.

Thank you Jassy for sharing the link. I was not aware Google made that change.