Does Panda Factor In Content In NonTraditional Formats?

[Pjman]

Hey Guys.

I'm trying to recover this one site from Panda. They had a lot of pages that had maybe 50 characters of content. Believe me that their users find it valuable. They are answers to questions of exercises they have on their site.

It was pretty ease to understand that their users liked these better in PDF format. They also want to preview the PDF and not download the whole.

So we are in the process of giving users what they want. Converted all pages to PDF and instead of a normal content page, they now receive a preview image of the PDF within the site template when they visit those pages.

I have been noindexing all pages that lead to PDFs that have little content. Should I also Nofollow those links to the PDFs?

They use Google Analytics, I'm sure G has a way of determining the user interaction with those files. I feel they would have positive metrics as a whole. So that is my reasoning for not adding "nofollow" to the PDFs. What do you guys think?

[netmeg]

I never use nofollow on any internal links. Ever.

I dunno about the setup you describe though. Even if the users do prefer it this way (which I admit, I am skeptical) I don't think it's going to be an easy job to convince Google. Even if the user engagement is very high.

Is the site running ads?

[tedster]

You can use the x-robots tag [webmasterworld.com] for non-html content like PDF files to tell the search engines not to index it. Here's a technical thread about it from our Apache forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 7:31 pm (utc) on Jul 9, 2012]

[Pjman]

@netmeg

Yes, I' running two ads a page on the pages with screenshots of the PDFs, but they are out of the way. Leaderboard at the bottom of page and a sky scraper, bottom left. Content is all up above.

@tedster

You da man! I didn't even know those existed.