• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Dynamically-generated .PDF files, instead of normal pages, indexed by and ranking in Google

        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.

        Dynamically-generated .PDF files, instead of normal pages, indexed by and ranking in Google

        Technical SEO
        2
        3
        2110
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • fugu
          fugu last edited by

          Hi,

          I come across a tough problem. I am working on an online-store website which contains the functionlaity of viewing products details in .PDF format (by the way, the website is built on Joomla CMS), now when I search my site's name in Google, the SERP simply displays my .PDF files in the first couple positions (shown in normal .PDF files format: [PDF]...)and I cannot find the normal pages there on SERP #1 unless I search the full site domain in Google. I really don't want this! Would you please tell me how to figure the problem out and solve it. I can actually remove the corresponding component (Virtuemart) that are in charge of generating the .PDF files. Now I am trying to redirect all the .PDF pages ranking in Google to a 404 page and remove the functionality, I plan to regenerate a sitemap of my site and submit it to Google, will it be working for me? I really appreciate that if you could help solve this problem. Thanks very much.

          Sincerely

          SEOmoz Pro Member

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • TheEspresseo
            TheEspresseo last edited by

            Recently discovered this:

            Indicate the canonical version of a URL by responding with the Link rel="canonical" HTTP header. Addingrel="canonical" to the head section of a page is useful for HTML content, but it can't be used for PDFs and other file types indexed by Google Web Search. In these cases you can indicate a canonical URL by responding with the Link rel="canonical" HTTP header, like this (note that to use this option, you'll need to be able to configure your server).

            Link: <http: www.example.com="" downloads="" white-paper.pdf="">; rel="canonical"</http:>

            Google currently supports these link header elements for Web Search only.

            -http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • TheEspresseo
              TheEspresseo last edited by

              I would consider either excluding the PDFs from the index with your robots.txt in conjunction with resubmitting your sitemap (which you're all over), or placing a text link at the bottom of each PDF pointing back to the HTML version of that page (which, all things being equal, should cause the HTML version of the page to rank instead). I am not sure about serving 404 headers to Google instead of the PDFs that are currently in the index. Why not 301 to the HTML version of each PDF? Obviously that can't be a permanent solution, as you will eventually want to restore the functionality to users, right? But it will tell Googlebot that the content of each PDF is to be found from here on out at the URL containing the HTML version. This is a case where it would be handy to serve one thing to the bots and another to the human viewers, but I am afraid that doing so could get you into trouble.

              I am interested in your case though—let us know what, if anything besides the 404s and sitemap resubmittal, you end up trying and what happens with it. I'm also curious to know what other mozzers suggest.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • vidi3423

                Does Page speed matter for google ranking?

                We are not sure that page does matter or not for google ranking as I am working for this keyword "flower delivery in Bangalore" from last few months and I saw some website's google first page who have low page speed but still ranking so I am really worried about my page that has also low page speed. will my Bangalore page rank on google the first page if the speed is low and kindly suggest me more tips for the ranking best factors which really works in 2020 and one more thing that domain authority really matters in this year? as I also saw some websites with low domain authority and ranking on google's first page. Home page: Flowerportal Bangalore page: https://flowerportal.in/flower-delivery/bangalore/ focus Keyword is: Flower delivery in Bangalore, send flowers to Bangalore

                Technical SEO | | vidi3423
                1
              • flo_seo

                Not all images indexed in Google

                Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks

                Technical SEO | | flo_seo
                1
              • zasite

                Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?

                Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.

                Technical SEO | | zasite
                0
              • yoursearchteam

                How To Cleanup the Google Index After a Website Has Been HACKED

                We have a client whose website was hacked, and some troll created thousands of viagra pages, which were all indexed by Google.  See the screenshot for an example.  The site has been cleaned up completely, but I wanted to know if anyone can weigh in on how we can cleanup the Google index.  Are there extra steps we should take?  So far we have gone into webmaster tools and submitted a new site map. ^802D799E5372F02797BE19290D8987F3E248DCA6656F8D9BF6^pimgpsh_fullsize_distr.png

                Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam
                0
              • rahulchowdhury

                Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog

                I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?

                Technical SEO | | rahulchowdhury
                0
              • TOMMarketingLtd.

                Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title

                I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it).  He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other.  Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl

                Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.
                0
              • ElmarReizen

                Does it hurt to have a dynamic counter in your page title?

                Currently we work with page titles which display the number of products we have as a counter. This number is highly volatile and can change every day, so that our page title changes all the time. We did this to improve user experience, meet expectations and improve click through rates. Question is whether this can hurt our rankings and if someone has experimented with this or has experience with this?

                Technical SEO | | ElmarReizen
                0
              • zazo

                How to tell if PDF content is being indexed?

                I've searched extensively for this, but could not find a definitive answer. We recently updated our website and it contains links to about 30 PDF data sheets. I want to determine if the text from these PDFs is being archived by search engines. When I do this search http://bit.ly/rRYJPe  (google - site:www.gamma-sci.com and filetype:pdf) I can see that the PDF urls are getting indexed, but does that mean that their content is getting indexed? I have read in other posts/places that if you can copy text from a PDF and paste it that means Google can index the content.  When I try this with PDFs from our site I cannot copy text, but I was told that these PDFs were all created from Word docs, so they should be indexable, correct? Since WordPress has you upload PDFs like they are an image could this be causing the problem? Would it make sense to take the time and extract all of the PDF content to html? Thanks for any assistance, this has been driving me crazy.

                Technical SEO | | zazo
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.