Stop search results displaying a "Quick View" of PDFs?

[ehcraig]

How do i to stop search results from displaying a "Quick View" of indexed pdf files from my site?

Our pdf's are being indexed as it always has.
I do not mind that search results are showing the pdf's, what I do mind is searchers downloading & printing pdf's from that we currently sell.

Can we put some sort of a tag on the code or in the robots file, to prevent the index from showing the "Quick View" of our pdf's?

Evans Craig

[edited by: tedster at 10:51 pm (utc) on May 5, 2010]

[tedster]

Hello ehcraig, and welcome to the forums.

If a pdf document is crawled and indexed, then when it shows in search results, it will show the "Quick View" option. Your other choice is to exclude these PDFs from crawling. Then the title and content snippet will not be returned on most keyword searches.

Even if it is no longer crawled, the pdf document may still show up as a result at times - but with the URL as the title, and the search result triggered by backlink anchor text. However, in that case, the Quick View option is gone.

You can exclude your PDFs from crawling by two methods:

1. Place a Disallow: directive in robots.txt for the .pdf documents you don't want crawled. You can exclude the directory where they are stored - or disallow them individually if they are all over the server.

2. Use an X-robots tag in the HTTP header for your protected PDF files. See [webmasterworld.com...]