nofollow in pdf files

Nofollow (rel="nofollow") is an html attribute. We all know that google also indexes pdf files. Is there any equivalent for nofollow that can be used for outbound links in a pdf file?

 

you can try making those outbound links an image

 

I don't see why you can't add it to the code in a PDF file.

 

What code?

 

How are you making your pdf files, on your server via programming or through acrobat?

If server generation I might be able to help you.

 

Using a pdf printer driver/program from microsoft word.

How can it be done otherwise by the way?

 

There are many, many ways to produce PDF files. The only way I would guess to make links w/ nofollow tags would be to convert html->pdf (do a google search as there are many ways to accomplish this) where you can physically say

<a href="blah.php" rel="nofollow">some words</a>

HTML:

I use fpdf with great success but it is relatively technical (do you get php?). I don't think you can even do this with the full, licensed version of acrobat. Not certain but I doubt it as acrobat is meant for things other than web dev.

 

May I inquire about your project or is it top secret?

I have an interest in nofollow links in PDFs also so if you get it figured out please post it here. If you are interested in doing this programmatically reply here and I'll shoot you a few helpful links.

 

I'm just curious. I am going to be adding several pdf files to one of my sites soon & would like to use nofollow in them.

Sure...

Please go ahead

 

First off, here is my new top 100 directories tool / program using this PDF generation stuff. The object of this is to get SEOs / directory owners or anybody else something with their logo on it so they can use it to give to clients or post on their site. The branding side of this is what i think is appealing. Comments appreciated but keep in mind I am still testing this program.

Directory owners: if you want your directory included in this all you have to do is go to my site and submit it.

___________________

Now, back to the nofollow thing. It is interesting that this problem does not seem to have been addressed online previously. Either that or the search engines are just flooded with a bunch of "how do I not get my PDF indexed" stuff. I even looked on PlanetPDF which has answered all my PDF questions previous to this, no luck.

About this method: http://www.fpdf.org/ is Oliver Plathey's bad ass open source PDF generator. Takes a little bit to get used to but it is the best way I have found to handle this stuff programmatically (PHP).

I've got a PDF that I just made attached for your viewing pleasure. The source of it is located here.

I looked at the code that generated the PDF (PDFs are in plain text and you can open them in wordpad) and could not find a reference to nofollow even though I embedded it in the html. PDFs handle things like linking much differently so I didn't really expect it to be as simple as looking for rel="nofollow". The line in the code with the links actually looks like this -->

<</Type /Annot /Subtype /Link /Rect [228.44 678.71 358.37 664.71] /Border [0 0 0] /A <</S /URI /URI (http://www.erectadirectory.com)>>>>

As you can see there is clearly not a nofollow in sight, but there is not a "<a href=" either so your guess is as good as mine if it embedded this command.

This effort of yours might be in vein as it would be important to note that just because you mark a link nofollow, that does not mean that spiders won't follow it. It was meant to say that you don't trust the link as it is not yours (for things like comment & forum spam). I think when you produce a PDF file it is assumed that you trust all the links enclosed and there might not be plans in the works to add this html tag to PDFs.

Sorry I couldn't offer better advise but I do hope this points you in the right direction. If you don't want to be bothered with learning how to use this fpdf thing just PM me the html code you want PDFd and I'll produce the PDF file with the rel=nofollow stuff for you and send it back. Whether it will work or not is another question altogether.