any web techies in the house ?

[markmarkymark]

Morning all ....

Have a small query regarding web programing ....

The basic problem is this :

I have a website with a number of pages, hosted on a fasthosts windows server. One of my pages contains serveral link which link directly to some PDF files. These files are free to download. Google as spidered my site well.

If you do a search on specific terms google will more than likely bring up a direct link to the PDF files. Whilst this is not a problem in itself (after all I want them listed) it means that someone can go direct to the PDF file without visiting the page where the links are. Thus they do not get a chance to see what else is on offer etc. Furthermore, one could put a direct link to the PDF files and sponge I guess ....

What I am after is some simple way of enuring that the user has to obtain the PDF from the link page. What I want to avoid is a situation where they get put off if, for example, clicking on a google link to the PDF file leads to a 'page error' or similar. I thought about redirection but the PDF file is not a page its just a file ....

I thought about emedding the PDF file in an actual page some how - but not sure thats reliable ...

I can password protect a folder on my server, so I thought about password protected the PDF file - but giving the password on the web page. The problem with this is that if they try to view the PDF from a google search listing it will bring up the password box, and if they do not know it (which they will not !) then it might end in a page error (or you do not have permission to view this page etc). I think that might put people off ....

so, (sorry for rammble), anyone got any ideas / scrips which will help me achieve this in a simple way ....

thanks for reading !

cheers

Mark

[altis]

Off the top of my head...

Copy all the text from the PDF onto your HTML page and then put a link there to 'PDF version'. With luck, if Google finds the HTML first then it will list it first. Also, given the option of two similar-looking pages then peeps are probably more likely to go for the HTML one.

As a backup, put a link at the top of the PDF back to the HTML page.

[Millay]

also if you have HTML versions of these files then, stop google from indexing the PDF documents. do a search for info about robots.txt

There may be some advance features within PDF files for allowing redirection but I doubt it.

[abailey152]

I haven't done this myself, but I guess you could use javascripts to serve the PDF files. Then the links would be to the javascripts, so the address of the files should not be collected by the search engines.