PDFs Disabled – SEO

I decided to disable the PDF creator on the website.  The current version of Joomla doesn't support nice looking PDF output anyway, so any content that is converted to PDF ends up looking like crap.  The decision to disable the functionality came from my recent kick on search engine optimization. The URLs on the site are now easy to read, understand, and remember by a human thanks to OpenSEF.

Using some tips from JoomlaAtWork, I've modified some of my core code so meta-tags for pages are now dynamically generated based off some tags I enter.  For those of you unfamiliar with this technology, meta data is basically just "data about data". For websites, it's typically used as a short summary for a page.  I automatically generate the summary's based on the article I've written and I usually go in and manually define the keywords.  I just recently did this, so hopefully google will crawl my site soon and get the new data.  When they do you can type "site:boshdirect.com" in a search to see how the meta tags create the search engine descriptions.

Anyways, back to the issue at hand.  I was looking at all the content listed for boshdirect.com on google and I noticed that the PDF content was showing up higher than the actual content.  This is an issue because the PDFs (1) dont look good, (2) dont link back to the site, (3) aren't as interactive. I could have simply modified the robots.txt file so google wouldn't index the files, but they still look like crap so I decided to just get rid of them.

I'm still considering removing the Print option from the pages to reduce the amount of "duplicate" content that search engines like yahoo, google, and dmoz see, but that will wait for another day. 

 

edit: For those of you who never even realized there was a PDF and Print option, there is also an "E-mail this article" option as well. All of these options are dynamically created at the top right of blog article pages. (However, they are not currently on the front page)


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