I’m just looking through some of the webmaster stats that Google provides, and noticed that the most common links to our website are to some research articles that we’ve put up in PDF format. The articles are also available on the site in HTML.
I was looking at the sites (mostly forums and blogs) which link to these articles and was thinking that none of the people clicking the links would actually get to see our website, and that we’re giving something away for free and not even getting some page views in return.
I thought that maybe I could change my server settings to redirect external requests to these files to the HTML version. This way, the users still get the same content (albeit in an unexpected format), and we’d get these people to see our website and hopefully explore it some more. Requests coming from my site should be let through to the PDF. Though I don’t know how to set this up just yet (keep an eye out for a follow-up question here), I’m sure this is technically possible. The only question is: is that a good idea?
What would you consider the downsides of redirecting traffic from external sources such that they see our site, not just get our content? Do they outweigh the benefits?
The only other alternate option I can see is to make our branding and URL much more visible in the PDF files themselves. Any thoughts?
Hopefully your PDFs are equally branded so that visitors will feel compelled to search further in your website. That might be just as important as having visitors briefly stop-over at your website.