PDF copies of HTML pages - is it a bad idea?

[howdo-i]

I want to offer my visitors the choice of viewing my content in html or pdf format but if I do this I will be creating duplicate content in 2 different formats. Does anyone know how the search engines view this? Will they index both versions, one version or no versions?

Thanks for any insight you might have.
Steve

[Colin Evans]

Google will index both versions, but if you save all your pdf files in one folder you can use a robots.txt file to instruct the search engines not to index anything in the folder.

Just add this to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /your-pdf-folder/

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by Colin Evans

Google will index both versions, but if you save all your pdf files in one folder you can use a robots.txt file to instruct the search engines not to index anything in the folder.

Just add this to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /your-pdf-folder/

Thanks for the robots.txt option but what if I don't do that and Google indexes both versions? Will Google disregard one version for the search listings or worse, will they penalise me and not list either version?

Best case would be to have both versions sow up in SE results.

Steve

[Colin Evans]

Hi Steve,

Google will not penalise you - if you want to read how Google treats duplicate content, I wrote about it here: Duplicate Content Penalty vs. Duplicate Content Filters – The Truth Revealed

It's quite possible both versions will be displayed in the search results, I've never had a pdf outrank a post, but I suppose it's possible. In the end it depends which gets the most incoming links...

[kindsvater]

In my experience Google will not penalize you. However, I've seen Google give a better ranking to a pdf copy (definitely had fewer incoming links than the original html page) - so it is something I've tried to avoid.

[dspa72]

Google will not penalize you. But I suggest you to avoid this duplicate content on your site. You could put the pdf in a zip file, for example

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by Colin Evans

Hi Steve,

Google will not penalise you - if you want to read how Google treats duplicate content, I wrote about it here: Duplicate Content Penalty vs. Duplicate Content Filters – The Truth Revealed

It's quite possible both versions will be displayed in the search results, I've never had a pdf outrank a post, but I suppose it's possible. In the end it depends which gets the most incoming links...

Thanks Colin, that's a very usefull post. It seems that all I have to do to work out what Google will do is apply common sense. That isn't always obviouse lol.

Steve

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by kindsvater

In my experience Google will not penalize you. However, I've seen Google give a better ranking to a pdf copy (definitely had fewer incoming links than the original html page) - so it is something I've tried to avoid.

I would be very pleased for the pdf's to rank higher than my pages because Google isn't exactly responding to my efforts yet lol.

Steve

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by dspa72

Google will not penalize you. But I suggest you to avoid this duplicate content on your site. You could put the pdf in a zip file, for example

Does Google not read content in zip files? It reads and indexes pdf files and operating systems have been viewing zip files as directories for years. I assumed that G would look inside zip files too.

Steve

[dspa72]

In my experience, I've never seen a search result coming from zip file. In this case, google just indexes the file name which can be found using the directive filetype:zip

Originally Posted by howdo-i

Does Google not read content in zip files? It reads and indexes pdf files and operating systems have been viewing zip files as directories for years. I assumed that G would look inside zip files too.

Steve

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by dspa72

In my experience, I've never seen a search result coming from zip file. In this case, google just indexes the file name which can be found using the directive filetype:zip

Hmmm come to think of it neither have I. Thanks for pointing this out.

Steve