WHY WAS I REFERRED TO A DUMMY HTML FILE INSTEAD OF DIRECTLY TO THE PDF DOCUMENT I WANTED TO SEE?

PDF documents are more expensive to index than HTML files. Omniture/Atomz.com, the company I pay to run the Search facility on my site, count every single page of a PDF document as a separate file. However, they count a single HTML file, no matter how long or short, as just that: as one single file. If the number of ‘files’ (i.e. HTML files plus pages of PDF documents) exceeds 1000 (which they do), I have to pay a lot more money..

To get round this problem I make dummy HTML versions of most PDFs on this site. I put the PDFs in a folder excluded from indexing and have the dummy HTMLs indexed instead. I put a direct link to the correct PDF at the top of those dummy HTML files.

Thanks to this ruse you can search the website and I don't have to pay extra. The only bother is that you have to click once more than otherwise, for me that I have to produce two versions of a helluva lot of files. If you know of another way round this problem, pleasee let me know!