Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do Backlinks to a PDF help with overall authority/link juice for the rest of the domain?
-
We are working on a website that has some high-quality industry articles available on their website.
For each article, there is an abstract with a link to the PDF which is hosted on the domain.
We have found in Analytics that a lot of sites link directly to the PDF and not the webpage that has the abstract of the article.
Can we get any benefit from a direct PDF link? Or do we need to modify our strategy?
-
You can/need to build links from within the domain to thePDF report you want to share also. Links within the PFD file will also help for people who share the file via email, and not within the site. This will bring people back to your domain.
-
Also have a Google for optimising pdfs for search, i know there are number of ways & options
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search
http://searchengineland.com/eleven-tips-for-optimizing-pdfs-for-search-engines-12156
-
Add links to your site within the .pdf
You can also add your branding to the .pdf
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Remove page with PA of 69 and 300 root domain links?
Hi We have a few pages within our website which were at one time a focus for us, but due to developing the other areas of the website, they are now defunct (better content elsewhere) and in some ways slightly duplicate so we're merging two areas into one. We have removed the links to the main hub page from our navigation, and were going to 301 this main page to the main hub page of the section which replaces it. However I've just noticed the page due to be removed has a PA of 69 and 15,000 incoming links from 300 root domains. So not bad! It's actually stronger than the page we are 301'ing it to (but not really an option to swap as the URL structure will look messy) With this in mind, is the strategy to redirect still the best or should we keep the page and turn it into a landing page, with links off to the other section? It just feels as though we would be doing this just for the sake of google, im not sure how much decent content we could put on it as we've already done that on the destination page. The incoming links to that page will still be relevant to the new section (they are both v similar hence the merging) Any suggestions welcome, thanks
Technical SEO | | benseb0 -
How to Delete the slug /category/ from wordpress category pages
Hi all, I would like to ask you what's the better way to eliminate the slug /category/ form the wordpress category pages. I need to delete the slug /category/ to make the url seo frendly. The problem is that my site is an old site with the page indexed by Google for a long time. Thanks for your advice.
Technical SEO | | salvyy0 -
Wordpress categories causing too many links/duplicate content?
I've just added categories to my wordpress site and some of the posts show in several of the categories. Will this cause me duplicate content problems as I want the category pages to be indexed? Also as I add more categories I'm creating more links on the page. They can't be seen to the user as I have a plugin that creates drop down categories. When I go to 'view source' though all the links are there so google will see lots of links. How can I fix the too many links problem? And should I worry about duplicate content issue?
Technical SEO | | SamCUK1 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Will errors on a subdomain effect the overall health of the root domain?
As stated in the question, we have 2 sub domains that contain over 2000 reported errors from SEOMOZ. The root domain has a clean bill of health, and i was just wondering if these errors on the sub-domains could have a negative effect on the root domain in the eyes of Google. Your comments will be appreciated. Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0
