![]() It is unlikely that the canonical reference will be respected if the landing page and PDF serve content which significantly differs If canonical is respected the PDF will stop ranking and most of the value will be transferred to your HTML landing page boosting its ranking potential Insert a canonical link in the HTTP header referencing the HTML landing page There is no guarantee that your HTML landing page will perform as well as the PDF file This will prevent the PDF file appearing in search results once it is recrawledĪll value obtained from any links to the pdf is lost. Noindex applied to file x-robots HTTP header We’ve compiled this table outlining the pros and cons associated with different approaches to deal with the occurrence of PDFs in search results. Adding the PDF to the robots.txt file, however this does not prevent it from being indexed in the search results.Linking to HTML pages containing PDF content instead of the PDF themselves.Creating an HTML version of the published PDF.Inserting a canonical link in the PDF’s HTTP header referencing the HTML page.Adding a “X-Robots: noindex” tag in the HTTP header used to serve the document.Various approaches can be taken when dealing with PDF documents in favour of HTML pages. The data acquired from Google Analytics on how people are using PDFs are limited such as getting data on what links users followed to PDFs. PDFs do not work the same way as HTML and prevents structured markup from being applied to the content. ![]() Do not allow for implementation of structured markup.Are difficult to maintain and update, and therefore visitors might get access to outdated or unreliable content.Lack site navigation, taking users away from the website and do not allow visitors to easily discover new or relevant pages which could potentially assist with increased overall traffic and conversions.Provide visitors with a poor user experience, particularly on mobile.Why would you not want a PDF to rank?ĭue to associated problems with PDF files, it is often preferable to rank an HTML page in their place because PDFs: This can result in PDFs being seen as a better result to return to users, and therefore PDFs outranking HTML webpages. Some report style content will be cited externally resulting in inbound links pointing to PDF files. HTML pages may lack depth and keyword relevance. Often content presented in PDF format is particularly in-depth spanning multiple pages and with keyword rich content. The text within PDFs is readable by search engines. This behaviour may not always be desirable. There might be instances in which Google encounters non-HTML files such as PDF documents and determines they deserve to rank higher than HTML pages.
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