That&#x27;s not quite what&#x27;s happening.<p>For most PDFs on the site, we use Scribd&#x27;s API to provide a nice in-browser display of the PDF, which uses Flash or HTML5 with mangled text under the hood (often separate elements for each character to preserve exact formatting), but we serve robots a plain-text version as clean as we can get it. We&#x27;re definitely not trying to &quot;fool OCR&quot; - we want the content to be indexed!<p>In this case, however, this is (was) a link to a &quot;Session&quot; on the PDF, basically a forum for Academia.edu users to discuss it which is moderated by the author, rather than the normal public facing page, so it&#x27;s actually supposed to be &quot;meta: noindex&quot;, and we don&#x27;t serve the plain-text version. It looks like somehow Google indexed it anyway, but got the Scribd version, which has text not meant for robotic consumption.