SEO Printer Friendly Pages and Link Equity
January 6, 2010 by admin
A common practice that inadvertently creates duplicate content within a Web Site involves printer-friendly pages. Printer- friendly pages are separate pages designed for printing, without the heavy images and advertisements that eat up a lot of printer ink.
There are several problems if you have twin versions of each content page, one being for viewing and one for printing:
• Link equity gets reduced. This problem is common to all forms of duplicate content. People are going to link to both versions, so the link equity value for your content is effectively split into two pages. A diminished link equity value means your page won’t rank as well in search results.
• Double the maintenance is a hassle. If you have printer- friendly duplicate pages on your site, you already know that anytime you want to make a change one, you have to crawl than your HTML version, they may choose the printer-friendly page particularly if your printer friendly page has received more back links than your HTML version. So basically, you lose control over which version greets first-time visitors coming from a search results page.
You don’t need to have separate text-only pages for printing. The best way to allow easy printing, keep your users happy, and follow SEO best practices is to use CSS. A print style sheet with your CSS can reformat your HTML so that they can be easily printed. Inside your CSS file, you can specify how a page should automatically change when a user chooses to print it. Your CSS can control print formatting such as page width, margins, font substitutions, and which images to print and which to omit. This is much better than duplicating your pages with printer-friendly versions.
If you currently have printer-friendly versions of your pages a separate URLs, I suggest you convert to a print style sheet in an external CSS file. You won’t need the Printer Version on your pages anymore (unless you want to leave them for usability, maybe changing the wording) because whenever a user prints a page using File-> Print of Ctrl+ P, your CSS automatically takes charge and delivers a printable version
When getting rid of printer-friendly pages you no longer need, be careful. Check for inbound links, update any internal links you may have to those pages, and setup a 301 redirect on the removed page. You want to make sure not to hurt your link equity or cause your users any problems when you remove a page.
If you decide you still want to keep your printer-friendly text versions, stop producing the duplicate content problem by putting a no index command in the HTML code to prevent search engines from crawling these pages. You’d probably lose some links, but at least the search engines wouldn’t confuse these pages with your main content.
About Author:
Vahe Arabian is part of the team at Lead Creation and Online Marketing Blogger. His focus is always upon discovering new ways to improve website usability and interactivity, and upon making use of emerging legitimate SEO methods.
Check out his Online Marketing Search Engine Optimisation Blog
