Support » Plugin: Delightful Downloads » Configuration to allow Google search of downloads

  • Resolved danbashaw

    (@danbashaw)


    We are using Delightful Downloads along with a Google CSE search engine on our site, and notice that it is not indexing PDF files uploaded with DD, or at least not doing so after 48 hours, though web pages are being indexed correctly.

    We have turned off directory protection, and there are no robots.txt rules that would prevent indexing. Likewise the directory permissions seem to be correct at 705.

    Are there any known issues or considerations for allowing search engines to access PDFs in Delightful Downloads? Any guidance on best practices would be appreciated.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/delightful-downloads/

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  • Thread Starter danbashaw

    (@danbashaw)

    As a follow-up, so far it appears that PDFs uploaded with Delightful Downloads do not get indexed by Google Search or Google CSE. I suspect that the indexing spider cannot follow the jump when the parameter http://example.com/?ddownload=1234 resolves to the actual absolute path of the PDF at http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/here-is-the-document.pdf.

    Ashley, can you confirm that this is the case? If so I’ll work around the issue by submitting a manual XML sitemap of the final URLs to the search engines.

    Cheers, Dan

    Thread Starter danbashaw

    (@danbashaw)

    A follow-up to close out this thread.

    Delightful Download PDFs are in fact indexing organically based on the short Delightful Download URLs. Google spiders the URL and presents it (Rather than the resolved absolute URL of the PDF) in the search results for both google CSE and Google search.

    PDFs of any kind can take a considerable length of time to be indexed, which is probably why I was not seeing results even several days after submission of an XML sitemap.

    Notes;

    – Indexing is the behaviour with Directory Protection turned off. I do not know what the indexing behaviour would be with protection turned on.

    – Given that indexing does work, I expect robots.txt rules would apply as they do for any URL, so if for some reason you did not want Delightful Downloads URLs to be indexed or followed, a rule could be written to exclude them.

    Ashley – Thanks again for an excellent product! I appreciate you keeping Delightful Downloads actively supported, along with all your other work commitments.

    Cheers, Dan

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