SEO: Recommended method to prioritize item pages over bitstreams

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Brian Keese

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Jul 31, 2024, 1:49:24 PM7/31/24

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Our primary user (our Scholarly Communications office) has requested that we find a way to prioritize item pages over bitstreams in Google and Google Scholar results.

Is this possible, or even recommended? Can anyone suggest a way to accomplish this? It looks like bitstreams aren't included in dspace sitemaps so they can''t be deprioritized there. Also, cannonicalization doesn't seem appropriate. Other ideas?

Thanks,

Brian Keese

Indiana University Library Technologies

DSpace Technical Support

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Aug 5, 2024, 12:31:52 PM8/5/24

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Hi Brian,

I'm not aware of a way to do that, as part of the issue resides with how Google / Google Scholar index content from repositories.

From what I've seen, Google Scholar especially will prioritize giving a direct link to files in their search results. Try a search in Google Scholar, and you'll see it gives two links... metadata & links to the "item page", and then a direct link to the main/primary file. Here's an example search for just "dspace": https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=dspace&btnG=

I'm not aware of a way to tell Google Scholar to not link to the files (bitstreams) directly, unless you hide or access restrict those files in some way. The only idea might be to remove the Google Scholar tags (in HTML <head>) embedded in each Item page. For instance, to find the file, GS will first look for the "citation_pdf_url" meta tag: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/blob/dspace-7_x/src/app/core/metadata/metadata.service.ts#L299

However, I will warn, DSpace added those tags based on recommendations from the Google Scholar team. Removing them may impact your site's SEO in general, and may make your content more difficult to find in Google Scholar. So, this may not achieve the result you are looking for.