Redirect for PDF file

[Anonymous]

Is it possible to redirect to a PDF file?

It seems impossible. This is a showstopper for part of what we are trying to do using Marketo. (We want to serve most of our PDFs from Marketo for tracking purposes, but not if we can never rename any of them.)

A similar question was asked and answered:
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PRJKAA4
But it appears it wasn't resolved satisfactorily. No solution was posted.

I have read the help article on Adding a Redirection Rule:
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000Kysu&src=comm

But will this work for PDFs (not landing pages)?

I set up a test and it fails. It returns a 404 error page; it does not redirect.

I tried to redirect requests for
http://pages.gridstore.com/rs/gridstoreinc/images/storage-switzerland-test.pdf
to
http://pages.gridstore.com/rs/gridstoreinc/images/StorageSwitzerland-Report-Gridstore-2011-SMB.pdf



Redirects are important. We will surely rename PDF files -- we will not keep all file names the same forever. When we rename PDFs, we need to be able to redirect to the current version. 301 redirects are easy for me to set up on a server I control, but on Marketo it may not be possible.

[Anonymous]

Hi Larry,

The simplest solution would depend on how you grant access to the PDFs - if they are all behind a form, you can just change the destination of the form anytime you change to a new file name. You can also pick generic file names to begin with, and replace the file with updated versions from the Design Studio.

Would either of those solutions help you accomplish what you are trying to do?

[Anonymous]

Hi Michele,

Thanks for your answer. Those are good ideas, but they don't solve the fundamental problem. You seem to be saying no, there's no way to redirect to PDFs on Marketo, but here are a couple ways that might help work around that problem. (The simplest solution for us would actually be to set up redirects, if that's possible.)

I don't think you are from Marketo (you're another Marketo user, like us), so I certainly thank you for your response. I will send this up to Marketo support and see what they will do.

A couple PDFs are gated behind forms, but 20 to 30 PDFs are not, and that number will be growing quite a bit as time passes. They are just PDFs we're currently serving/linking directly from our main public site. But that's what we want to do right now. How we will link to PDFs will probably change over the next few years and therefore isn't certain, which partially explains why redirects are needed.

Some of the PDFs already have fairly generic file names (others don't, and we want to keep them that way). Despite that, I know we will run into naming/redirecting issues. That's just the way it goes when maintaining the web site of a growing young company.