A lot of magazines make their content available both on their site and in a pdf somewhere on the site. The obvious problem this poses to online content is simply that search engines don’t like duplicate content. If your me, and you host most of your pdfs on a server like ISSUU than you have a really big problem because not only is your content duplicated, but it’s duplicated accross multiple sites (which can only be worse from a Search Engine perspective). Suddenly, Google thinks you’re plagiarizing your own content. It’s kind of poetic really.
So what’s the solution? Good question. Magazines that want to continually have high search engine rankings, for the time being, are going to have to remove the optical character recognition from their pdfs. Yeah, it sucks, but until metrics are improved, it’s better to rank high than to rank low (or not at all). How much would it suck to get de-googled because every page on your site is almost exactly the same text of either another page on your site or pages on some other site.
