Table of Contents
WP Engine Redirect PDFs #
WPE has a redirect tool:
https://my.wpengine.com/
(This is not htaccess, as WPE no longer supports htaccess)
My initial test showed it did not work for the PDF files, but I got on chat with WPE and they added an “nginx rule to proxy rule to read the pdf as a static file” according to support contact. This is now working and future PDF redirects should work using this tool as well.
If this comes up in the future, contact WPE to ask for this customization.
Rules to redirect specific PDFs (no regexp) #
Source (origin): Just add a ^at the beggining of the URL (without the domain). For example, if you want to redirect from https://www.mightyminnow.com/test/my-test.pdf you would add ^/test/my-test.pdf
Destination: Just add the full URL of the destination.
Example:
WP Engine Exclude PDFs #
NGINX rule that has been applied to specific client sites to exclude PDFs from search:
location ~* (.*\.pdf) { add_header X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow, nosnippet, noarchive”; }
9/10/24 update: they no longer were helpful about this. The way to ASK google not to index pdfs is by creating a custom robots.txt file in Yoast:
/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_tools&tool=file-editor
That states:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.pdf$
