GWT shows 38 external links from 8 domains to this PDF - But it shows no links and no authority in OSE
-
Hi All,
I found one other discussion about the subject of PDFs and passing of PageRank here: http://moz.com/community/q/will-a-pdf-pass-pagerank But this thread didn't answer my question so am posting it here.
This PDF: http://www.ccisolutions.com/jsp/pdf/YAM-EMX_SERIES.PDF is reported by GWT to have 38 links coming from 8 unique domains. I checked the domains and some of them are high-quality relevant sites. Here's the list:
Domains and Number of Links
prodiscjockeyequipment.com 9
decaturilmetalbuildings.com 9
timberlinesteelbuildings.com 6
jaymixer.com 4
panelsteelbuilding.com 4
steelbuildingsguide.net 3
freedocumentsearch.com 2
freedocument.net 1However, when I plug the URL for this PDF into OSE, it reports no links and a Page Authority if only "1". This is not a new page. This is a really old page.
In addition to that, when I check the PageRank of this URL, the PageRank is "nil" - not even "0" - I'm currently working on adding links back to our main site from within our PDFs, but I'm not sure how worthwhile this is if the PDFs aren't being allocated any authority from the pages already linking to them. Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Thanks all!
-
Hi Dana,
I'm inclined to think that this is a problem with how the tools process links to and from PDFs rather than the passing of PageRank through PDFs itself as well, although I am not sure. I would certainly not say no to a link to or from a great PDF if that was the only option, although I have also actively encouraged clients to re-publish their quality content housed in PDF format as HTML and redirect the PDF file to the new source. We're just a lot more sure about how authority passes through HTML files.
-
Very interesting Travis. I hadn't even thought to take a look at some competitor's pdfs to see what they are looking like in some of the same tools. Yes, this is something we need to keep testing to see if we can figure out if going through the trouble of inserting links back to our domain is a worthwhile project.
-
That's interesting, but how are the buildings sites relevant? None of them seem to get much traffic over the last couple of years either. The free docs sites appear to have an appreciable amount of estimated traffic, but what of the next Panda update?
Now, for the thought. I checked Sony.com for PDF files via operator. The tenth result was this. It had a Moz PA of 35. The rest were 1s. I couldn't get any backlink information from Majestic or Ahrefs. So, it appears all of our tools are dreadfully broken in this scenario. The best thing to do is more testing.
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
-
Links from a nonexistent domain, what do we do?
Our website is receiving 15 links that I believe are negatively impacting us. The problem is, this website linking to us no longer exists. The domain is not even hosted. The website linking to us is: thepurpleelephantboutique . com/ How do we fix/resolve this issue?
Technical SEO | | spadedesign0 -
301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
Hello all, As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile. The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to? I would appreciate your advise!
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Cross domain canonical, pros, cons, and link popularity?
We have a client who has two well trusted web properties, their insurance site where they sell insurance offerings, and a state specific blog they own where they promote healthy living. They want to improve their traffic/rankings/etc to the main site but they want to keep their blog where its at for PR (it already has a great following). So my quesiton is, if we do set up a secondary blog on the main site and use canonical tags on the more trusted external blog to link to the main site. Will that pass on the link popularity their external blog gets along with all the benefits of the fresh content, etc? I've never actually seen anyone do this yet, keen to try it but not with a client.
Technical SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Domains
My questions is what to do with old domains we own from a past business. Is it advantages to direct them to the new domain/company or is that going to cause a problem for the new company. They are not in the same industry.
Technical SEO | | KeylimeSocial0 -
Nofollow link passing link juice
Can a link which is nofollwed pass link juice ? Please see the discussion at - http://www.seomoz.org/q/if-multiple-links-on-a-page-point-to-the-same-url-and-one-of-them-is-no-followed-does-that-impact-the-one-that-isn-t
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
What to do with domain?
I bought a domain a couple months ago while having delusions of granger. The domain is PR2, has around 30 decent backlinks, and a small amount of traffic. It also has one of our keywords in the domain name. I'm thinking of 301 redirect to our homepage. Is there a downside to doing this? We really could use the additional traffic on our site.
Technical SEO | | dmac0 -
Why is this url showing as "not crawled" on opensiteexplorer, but still showing up in Google's index?
The below url is showing up as "not crawled" on opensitexplorer.com, but when you google the title tag "Joel Roberts, Our Family Doctors - Doctor in Clearwater, FL" it is showing up in the Google index. Can you explain why this is happening? Thank you http://doctor.webmd.com/physician_finder/profile.aspx?sponsor=core&pid=14ef09dd-e216-4369-99d3-460aa3c4f1ce
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Redirecting a domain
I was setting up a new campaign and received the following error from Roger Robot. "We have detected that the domain www.sitename.com and the domain sitename.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here." I know about redirecting a PAGE using 301 Redirects and how to specify the www. canonical in Google webmaster tools, but is there a "DOMAIN" redirect that I'm missing. What would you suggest doing given the error message above. Thanks, Bill Sqnch.jpg
Technical SEO | | Marvo0