I just look at some of the webmaster statistics that Google provides , and I noticed that the most common links to our site are some research articles that we posted in PDF format. Articles are also available on the site in HTML format.
I looked at sites (mainly forums and blogs) that linked to these articles, and I thought that none of the people who click on the links really see our site, and that we give something for free and not even get some views pages in response.
I thought that maybe I could change my server settings to redirect external requests for these files to the HTML version. Thus, users still receive the same content (albeit in an unexpected format), and we got these people to see our site and hopefully explore it a little more. Requests coming from my site must be transferred to PDF. Although I do not know how to do this until now (follow the next question here), I am sure that it is technically possible. The only question is: is this a good idea?
What do you consider the disadvantages of redirecting traffic from external sources so that they see our site, and not just receive our content? Do they outweigh the benefits?
The only alternative I can see is to make our branding and URLs much more visible in the PDF files themselves. Any thoughts?
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