Canonical Tag for files

Hello everybody,

I have the following question:
On a page that deals with a wedding checklist, an introduction and declaration of use should be found on the page itself. In addition, the checklist itself can be downloaded. I would like to offer this as both Excel and PDF. The contents of Excel and PDF are very similar.

I’ve read that Google also checks files for duplicate content.

Questions:
1. How can I ideally set a canonical tag for these files without working in the source code (I can’t do that yet)?
2. Am I right in assuming that I will link to one file on one file and the other file on the other?
3. If that doesn’t work without working in the source code, can someone explain this to me or provide a link to a description?
4. Would it be technically wiser if I also reproduced the checklist on the HTML page and referred both files to this HTML page with the canonical tag? This checklist is over 400 lines long, which is why I wouldn’t like to have it on the HTML page.
5. I don’t need to set canoncial tags on all other pages (ordinary pages without duplicate content), right? Does WP do this automatically or are they not necessary?

By the way, I use the Rank Math SEO plugin

Thank you so much!!!

Best regards
Pia

• This topic was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic