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.
Should I add PDF manuals to my product pages?
-
Hello.
A lot of the products I sell on my e-commerce site are very technical. I decided to add PDF data sheets, manuals etc on each of the product pages to improve the customer experience. Now I am not sure if it was the best thing to do. I have noticed a couple of times that the PDF is out ranking the product page in the SERP. For a few products, the PDF ranks but the product page doesn't. Anyone got any ideas?
-
I am struggling with the rel="canonical". If each product had its own product PDF then it would be easy to use the rel="canonical". However, some of the PDF manuals cover somewhere between 200-300 products. The only difference between some of the products is the physical size (like televisions i.e. 32" vs 37") so the same manual covers all the products within that range. I am guessing using the same PDF manual for so many products is a duplicate content issue, but sadly they are really useful for users. Maybe I could put all the pdfs on the product category pages. That said the MOZ tools are showing that we only have 200 duplicate pages out of 250,000, which I think is good.
I agree with Mike, a summary of the PDF, FAQs and how to guides would be an advantage. I've already started adding this information for some of the more popular products but we don't have enough people to write content for every product. A smaller site would be a lot easier.
Anyone got any ideas?
@Dave - thanks mate
-
Keep in mind that many shopping carts have "buy buttons" and "purchase links" that can be embedded in .pdf documents and will deliver the visitor (and the item) into the shopping cart when clicked.
-
As an irrelevant aside - love that avatar David.
-
I agree with Mike here.
While technically the canonical might do what you want (kind of) this isn't what it's intended for. Another side to that coin is, if you funnel the strength to the product page from the PDF but the product page doesn't have the content that the PDF was ranking for then you still won't get the rankings on the product page and on top of that, you'll lose them on the PDFs.
-
Whoa! Those are big PDFs and a lot of products.
If that is the case then I think the only way you could get people to link to your actual webpages vs the PDFs would be to offer them 1) a summary of the PDF 2) frequently asked questions about the product 3) how-tos not covered in the PDFs or something.
As far as the canonical idea, that is not really what that tag is used for according to Google -
"Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).
For instance, if a site has a set of pages for the same model of dance shoe, each varying only by the color of the shoe pictured, it may make sense to set the page highlighting the most popular color as the canonical version so that Google may be more likely to show that page in search results. However, rel="canonical" would not be appropriate if that same site simply wanted a gel insole page to rank higher than the shoe page."
Mike
-
Thanks for advice. In the main, we've tried to add content from the PDF into the product pages but the PDFs are usually 150 pages long and we've got 250,000 products online. I will try the canonical idea and see what happens. Cheers for all the answers.
-
Mike - you took the words right out of my mouth and I'm glad I read the replies before answering.
The question shouldn't be, "should I remove the PDFs?" it should be, "What about my PDFs are ranking higher and how do I move that to my product pages?"
-
There are a couple of things you can do that will help your product pages rank better over your pdf pages. You can do a canonical from the pdf to the product page it is referencing, giving your product page the ranking value. You can incorporate your pdf into text (html) on your product page, giving your product page additional, relevant content, thus boasting ranking.
-
Hi David,
This typically happens when your PDFs are full of content people want. I have seen this personally with a previous company I worked with and their spec sheets (it was for a software copy). This is good and bad - good people find your content awesome and are linking to it - bad that your PDFs are ranking vs your pages.
Solution - make your pages better. You could potentially take the content from your PDFs and make a page - this in theory should still compel people to link to you. If your PDFs are massive in size, you could consider condense the contents into a webpage that contains FAQs, a summary of the information, etc.
This isn't a bad problem to have. If you can't beat them, join them - optimize your PDFs for search.
Hope this helps.
Mike
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
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Do You Add City Name & Key Word For Every Page?
Hello, I'm new to SEO but feel I have a decent grasp on it. However, I had a question pertaining to key words and using my city name in it. For instance, if I am using the key word "herniated disc treatment" do I need to put in my city name behind it or does google recognize that I am already in my city area because of my geo tagging and having it listed on the footer of my site? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! -Scott
On-Page Optimization | | slgray0 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
Home page and category page target same keyword
Hi there, Several of our websites have a common problem - our main target keyword for the homepage is also the name of a product category we have within the website. There are seemingly two solutions to this problem, both of which not ideal: Do not target the keyword with the homepage. However, the homepage has the most authority and is our best shot at getting ranked for the main keyword. Reword and "de-optimise" the category page, so it doesn't target the keyword. This doesn't work well from UX point of view as the category needs to describe what it is and enable visitors to navigate to it. Anybody else gone through a similar conundrum? How did you end up going about it? Thanks Julian
On-Page Optimization | | tprg0 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
Home page or landing page?
Hello, I want to ask a question related to that - Should we put keywords in the home page title if we wish to position another landing page better for particular keywords? I have read in one website about SEO that it's good the main keywords of your website to be positioned in homepage title also. f.e. Let's say we have website about web-design and our company is named Company Ltd. The title of the home page is "Company Ltd. - Web design, SEO, etc" We have also another inner page named "Web design | Company Ltd.". So should we leave the first page name only "Company Ltd." and the landing page's name "Web design | Company Ltd." . I don't know if they both have the same keyword in their title they won't compete with each other.
On-Page Optimization | | HrishikeshKarov0 -
Are blank Product Review pages bad for SEO?
Hi there, I'm running a new e-commerce site (BoatOutfitters.com) and have a question about our product review pages. On our current campaign, we have a lot of duplicate page content errors. When we export the data, it's almost all blank product review pages (since we are new, we don't have that many product reviews yet). Our product reviews aren't run through javascript, so we originally did not add them to a robots.txt file - however, I'm now wondering if it's worse to have all of these duplicate blank pages, or is it not affecting our SEO at all? Should we just wait until these products have reviews which will benefit our SEO and then they won't be considered "duplicate pages" - right? Sorry if this has been answered before - new here at SEO Moz and just looking for some help. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BoatOutfitters0 -
E-Commerce product pages that have multiple skus with unique pages.
Hey Guys, With the recent farm/panda update from google i'm at a cross roads as to how I should optimize product pages for a project i'm working on for a client. My client sells tires and one particular tire brand can have up to 15 models and each model can have up to 30 sizes. IE: 'Michelin Pilot Sport Cup' comes in 15 different sizes. Each size will have it's unique product page and description bringing me to my question. Should I use the same description on every size? I do plan on writting unique content for each tire model however i'm not sure if I should do it for every size. After all the tire model description is the same for every size, each size doesn't carry any unique characteristics that I can describe. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | MikeDelaCruz770