: GWMT Show Non Existent Backlinks "Via Intermediate Link" I run 2 sites, Site A and Site B. These are ecommerce sites, with site A being built first, and both sites selling the same thing.

@Megan663

Google is certainly recognizing the duplicate content. unless you are seeing ranking drops, it is unlikely that you are being penalized. What happens is likely:


You publish the PDF on one site: site1.example.com/docs/chemical-foo-safety-data.pdf
You publish the PDF on the other site: site2.example.com/pdf/safty-data-chemical-foo.pdf
Googebot recognizes that these two documents are identical
Google chooses site1.example.com/docs/chemical-foo-safety-data.pdf as the canonical document
When Google sees a link to site2.example.com/pdf/safty-data-chemical-foo.pdf it treats it as if it were a link to the canonical document.
You get messages about redirects because of how Google handles canonicalization.


While you have a legal obligation to publish this content and make it available to your users, you don't have to make it crawlable. There are several reasons that you might want to block it in robots.txt:


It was not authored by you and can likely be found on other sites.
You have it on both of your sites, and Google is clearly seeing your two sites as related because of it.
You wouldn't expect users to come to your site when searching for words or phrases contained in these documents. Even if the documents do attract visitors, you would rather have users land on a page where they could purchase products.


For more information, you should read What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site? about when Google does and does not penalize for duplicate content.

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