Can PDFs on your website be picked up in search engines?
-
Can PDFs on your website be picked up in search engines? There's a ton of info online that says it can and can't be picked up.
-
Agreed! I had an issue with many PDFs ranking. I've done what I can to clean things up so better pages rank instead (my goal is to sell; I'd rather someone end up on my page that has an "add to cart" button AND a link to the catalog/PDF info).
Anyone who says it can't happen - well, it did to me.
-
Short answer, yes. Search engines are still not as good at crawling and indexing them as well as they are with HTML pages, but they have definitely made strides in recent years. Do a Google search for "filetype:pdf" and you will see all of the PDFs that are indexed in Google.
That being said, they are still not ideal for SEO so I recommend not using them whenever possible. I wrote a couple of blog posts about this issue - http://streamlinemetrics.com/blog/seo-for-pdfs-optimizing-pdf-files-for-search-engines.php and http://streamlinemetrics.com/blog/how-to-redirect-pdf-files-with-php-asp-or-htaccess-for-seo-seo-for-pdfs-part-2.php.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do Search Engines Try To Follow Phone Number Links
Any SEO thoughts on using rel="nofollow" when inserting a link to a phone number? To make a phone number click to call we use (555) 555-1234 Wondering if search engines are trying to follow that link or if this is standard and not to worry. Any thoughts on if I should add rel="nofollow" to these or does it not matter? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Lions-Pro0 -
Can we change Title and/or Descriptions Dynamically Based on Search Query
If I recall we used to be able to change our title attributes tag dynamically based on the search query but not sure if it's possible now or if it makes sense to do so. Thoughts? Rosemary
On-Page Optimization | | RosemaryB1 -
Nofollow links to own website pages
To preserve link juice should I "nofollow" links to about us and contact us pages that appear at the top of our navigation? I read this article - but I am not familiar with the authenticity: http://www.eminentseo.com/blog/navigation-menu-optimization-best-practices/ Thanks Mike
On-Page Optimization | | henandstag0 -
Page/Website Structure
Hello again Mozzers, We have a category, lets call it widgets. Within widgets are about a hundred or so products. For usability my predecessor made the following layout Widgets Main Cateogry - Links off homepage - (no content just links to the 3 sub-categories)
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
- Widgets by Resolution
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 0.1 Resolution widgets
0.2 resolution widgets
- Widgets by Capacity
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 1 capacity widgets
2 capacity widgets
- Widgets by Type
---- About 12 subcategories This was a major improvement from a userbility perspective as it made a very complex product range navigatable by the major features or basic type. However, as you can imaging we now have 60+ very similiar pages all displaying very similiar products a nightmare for SEO. It also isnt ideal for user navigation as it take too many clicks to get to the products. I propose the following fix, and i wanted your opinion. Widget Main Category - Link from homepage (Consolidated with Widgets by Type)
-300 Words of content
-Links to the 12 Sub-type Catoregies (These are pages i can fill with content + products. This would give me a more ordinary structure of which I can focus each page to a keyword) The tricky part comes with incorporating the capacity and resolution options. 1 Browse Capacity Page
(20 sub categories all the same except capacity quantity & products)
1 Browse by Resolution Page
(20 sub categories all the same except resolution value & products) The owner want them, I was going to link from the main widgets page to each of these to give the customer the option. What I can't decide is how to deal with them from an SEO point of view. Should they be no-followed? canonicaled? Can there be any advantage to having so many pages covering slightly different variations or as i suspect it is dangerous to the overall health of the site. To complicate things further, Canonical tags may not be an option due to an old magento version running that doesnt support them. Is there an alternative way around? As always many thanks.0 -
Can I use nofollow to limit the number of links on a page?
My website is an ecommerce and we have on homepage about 470 links ! 1. We have a top bar with my account, login, faq, home, contact us and link to a content page. 2 . Then we have multistore selection 3. Then we have the departament menu, with several parants + child category links 4. Then we have a banner 5. Then we have a list of the recently sold and new products. 6. then we have an image grid with the most important cms/content pages (like faq, about us, etc) 7. then we have footer, with all info pages, contact us, about us, my account etc. There are some links that are repeted 2, 3 times. For a user it is easier to find the informations but I'm not sure how search bots (google) deal with that. So I was thinking on how can I have around 150 links to be followed. To remove the links from the page is not possible. What about to add nofollow to repeted links and some child category, as the spider will crawl the father and will access child on the next page? Is this a good strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | qgairsoft0 -
I have lots of articles on my website. Should I add myself as the Author Rank for seo purposes
Hi All, We have lots of articles on our news page of our website. Should we add one of us as the author to gain Author Rank points so to speak ?.. Have not done anything previously with this but just wondered if we were missing a trick here thanks Pete
On-Page Optimization | | PeteC120 -
XML Sitemaps for Property Website
Hi all, I was hoping that someone might have a link to a good example of an XML Sitemap for a large property (real estate) website? Thanks in advance to anyone who does! 🙂 Gavin
On-Page Optimization | | IcanAgency0 -
Are three Adsense ads on a long page a negative for search ranking?
I've not a site whose home page that is #1 for a popular keyword. The page is 1200 words, plus comments following. It's a clean page with no popups, and has one large rectangle Adsense ad above the fold (lots of text around this ad, and a very high percentage of page ATF is text), and another large rectangle Adsense ad that is midway down the article (after you have to page twice to get there). So, it's a very low ad to text ratio and ATF looks very clean. I have room for one more Adsense ad closer to the bottom of the article, which would be about five page downs through the page. My question is, will placing another ad way down the page affect my ranking in any negative way? I'm so pleased with my #1 ranking I hesitate to add it. But the page converts in Adsense so well, and heat maps show a large number readers do read all the way down the page, so I'd like to pick up some more ad revenue.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0