Hi,
Lets say you have a blog based on anything from vacuum cleaners, skateboards or holidays in Germany is it possible to turn it into a PDF e-book which you can distribute?
What I’m planning to do is to:
- Copy and Paste my latest 30 posts and into a book.
- Add a nice front cover with a catchy title.
- Upload the PDF to my site
- Distribute links to a page which hosts the e-book on my website.
However, I haven’t done anything like this before and I want to know if I am doing it correctly and if it is worth while.
I am concerned that I will be duplicating the content on my site which Google can read and penalise my site because I have diplicated content on my own site.
Hey Luke,
If you’re just copying the content from your website into your PDF ebooks, there is a high chance that Google will be able to scan through your PDF and penalise you for duplicated content. However, if you wish to go ahead with uploading a PDF ebook, you would have to include the preferred URL / specify the canonical version in your page. This Q&A article by Google may help you in this (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.sg/2011/09/pdfs-in-google-search-results.html).
However, I’m not sure if putting articles about vacuum cleaners, skateboards and other unrelated topics into an ebook will be useful from the perspective of content marketing. It would be preferable if your ebook consists of articles under the same topic, which provides more targeted help to people needing advice in a certain area.
Just a suggestion: Why not consider using the ebook as a “freebie” to entice visitors to sign up for your newsletter? This way, you won’t need to host your ebook on your website, and use it as a content marketing strategy at the same time.