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1. Re: stop Google indexing of PDFs?
~graffiti Sep 20, 2010 12:10 PM (in response to phyllisj9)You could save the PDF's in the .jpg format (or yes, outlining the text would do the trick).
Other than that, placing all the PDF's in the same folder and adding a robot.txt file would be the only choice I'm aware of. Keep in mind that a robot.txt file is a gentlemen's agreement and isn't necesarily honored by some search engines although Google does tend to honor them.
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2. Re: stop Google indexing of PDFs?
simonbell9 Sep 20, 2010 12:19 PM (in response to phyllisj9)Hi,
It is not my exact area of expertise but I think you can turn it off using Google Webmaster tools.
If the information is that sensitive them I would remove file completely.
Thanks
Simon
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3. Re: stop Google indexing of PDFs?
Bill@VT Sep 20, 2010 12:38 PM (in response to simonbell9)For such sensitive files, I simply put them in a password protected folder on my site. That is the simplest process.
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4. Re: stop Google indexing of PDFs?
phyllisj9 Sep 20, 2010 12:48 PM (in response to Bill@VT)Thanks everybody. I wish I had a choice not to post these files on the Internet, but they are PDFs of my company's magazine. They want them online and searchable -- I'm just trying to figure out how to keep Google from indexing the staff names. I guess I'll outline that section every issue (and go back and redo all the past issues). I wish Google would give people options on what was indexed. I think it's really unsafe that they force everything to be searchable unless you can go to great lengths to prevent it. I don't have access to the main server for a robots file, nor can I password-protect this.
Thanks, Phyllis
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5. Re: stop Google indexing of PDFs?
phyllisj9 Sep 20, 2010 12:49 PM (in response to phyllisj9)Is it possible to force an existing PDF into outline form? Can I re-distill to achieve that rather than starting over and recreating everything?
Thanks, Phyllis
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6. Re: stop Google indexing of PDFs?
phyllisj9 Jun 17, 2011 8:54 AM (in response to phyllisj9)Just in case the question comes up for anyone else:
You can take an existing PDF and outline the text (without having to start over from InDesign). I used this tutorial here:
http://www.stevewareham.com/text2outlines.php
I'm outlining just the page of our magazine that has the staff list on it because I really don't like that Google shows people where I work immediately.
Easy to go through and do that to the PDFs on our website now that I know how it's done. (Would have been really painful to try to recreate the PDFs.)
I wish there were some way of opting out of having massive amounts of personal information online. I keep trying to get all these companies like mylife.com to remove my information. Those should be opt IN (not out) procedures (I've never been a member of their site yet they were making my personal information available online).
Thanks, Phyllis




