PDFs and indexing
-
Hello and good morning.
I work for a paint manufacturing company in the UK on their seo campaigns across a couple of websites, this is my question. as paint and chemicals require data and tech sheets by law, available to be downloadable for said product, should these be included in the sitemap, we auto generate our sitemaps which they include these files, with low priorities and never change in terms of name etc.
they basically have a name of say 092847.pdf for example which cannot be changed, but from an seo view this doesn't mean a thing? so theres my question should they be included and would they carry any value?
-
thank you, I'm not saying they couldn't be changed it would just cause a lot of stress for our labs and tech guys who create these and work by the number. were as having a naming structure things would become a mess and everything up in the air.
I will look into the back end keywords, authors, company name which may give them some sort of impact from what I read on the link above.
-
-
Hi
Sitemaps - yes, include anything in Sitemaps that you want users to be able to find, so the more ways you can lead a Search Engine to it, the better.
Filename - it would help if you could change the filenames to include keywords, but if that's not an option then there are other things you can do to optimise each PDF.
There's a good overview of optimising PDFs here - How To Optimize PDF Documents For Search
As that post mentions, include links back to your site for maximum value, especially if these documents are shared on other websites. Also, a bit of branding within each PDF (just add a logo) could help you out in some way.
Hope that's helpful
-
Case A:
If the content of the PDF's is valuable, if it contains also some text about the product, I would make them indexable. It will make niche searchers find you.
You might want to make a separate sitemap for these PDF's, just to keep things clean.Case B:
If it's only numbers and very technical jibber jabber, I wouldn't let it index, since Google won't understand it either.Update with an interesting story:
A client of mine also had technical PDF sheets online. He has put a lot of effort in that. There were a few (4-5) competitors using direct links to the PDF's. After a while, we referred all that competitor traffic to a special landing page trying to convince why my client is a better deal. It's still online on some of the sites, since some competitors never really checked the PDF's.
Made my client very happy. -
Hey there
I can't imagine them having any SEO value, but I can't see the PDFs doing any harm either.
PDFs are crawlable and indexable by the search engines, so I would want to keep it in your sitemap for the user. I'm quite familiar with your industry (my dad worked with providing paint and chemical coatings) and I can imagine your target audience being quite specific in their searches, looking for products by code and specifications. A PDF would probably be the ideal solution for this and so having it indexed and sitting on your domain could bring in some organic traffic.
I'd make sure that the PDFs are branded if possible containing clear links back to your site, in order to funnel any long-tail traffic back to your homepage and sales pages.
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
-
How to Diagnose "Crawled - Currently Not Indexed" in Google Search Console
The new Google Search Console gives a ton of information about which pages were excluded and why, but one that I'm struggling with is "crawled - currently not indexed". I have some clients that have fallen into this pit and I've identified one reason why it's occurring on some of them - they have multiple websites covering the same information (local businesses) - but others I'm completely flummoxed. Does anyone have any experience figuring this one out?
Reporting & Analytics | | brettmandoes2 -
Google Webmaster Tools - spike in 'not selected' under Index Status
Hi fellow mozzers Has anyone seen a huge shift in the number of pages 'Not Selected' under Index Status in Google WMT, and been able to identify what the problem has been? My new client recently moved their site to wordpress - and in doing so the number of pages 'not selected' rose from ~200 to ~1100, It was high before but is ridiculous now. I am thinking there must be a new duplicate content issue which should be cleaned up in my quest to improve their SEO. Could it be the good old WP tag/category issue? In which case I won't worry as Joost is doing its job of keeping stuff out of the index. There are loads of image pages which could well appear as dupe as have no content on them (i do need to fix this), but Google is already indexing these so doesn't explain the ones 'not selected'. I've tried checking dupe title tags but there are very few of them so that doesn't help Any other ideas of how to identify what these problem pages maybe? Thanks very much! Wendy
Reporting & Analytics | | Chammy0 -
Automatic Checking indexation of websites
Hi Guys, do you know a tool that can check al list of websites (directorys) wich automatically checks if the website are indexed in Google. The list is very long and I would like to have a tool wich checks them all with only CnP them once. thankx a lot der.rabauke
Reporting & Analytics | | Lincus0 -
How can you tell if your new content has been indexed?
Other than simply doing a search in each case, is there any way I can tell (in Webmaster Tools, for example) if the 500-1000 new pages of content I have added have been indexed and are now appearing in search results? My traffic hasn't risen much, but I know at least a few of them are in there... How can I tell when they're all in?
Reporting & Analytics | | corp08030 -
Yahoo wont Index my site...???
For some reason every time I get an SEO report card, or even check for my site on Yahoo, im never there. An the Report card always tells me that I am not being indexed by Yahoo. I don't understand bc my site is indexed by Google and Bing beautifully. I feel like I am missing out on good potential traffic...Any suggestions?
Reporting & Analytics | | Caseman0 -
Google: show all images indexed on a domain
Is there a way to display all images that google has indexed on a domain / subdomain? I'm basically looking for something like a site:-command for google image search.
Reporting & Analytics | | jmueller0 -
Links and index missing from Google Webmaster Tools!
I've been using a wordpress blog and using google analytics and webmaster tools. I'd never done very much optimizing of my site, my strategy had always been to just keep writing relevant posts and let google do the rest. At some point I installed a SEO plugin to wordpress and did a tiny amount of tweaking, but I noticed that in my webmaster tools page, all my "links to this site" links are gone! My site map says 42 pages submitted, 42 pages indexed, but all the links that I've built over the past few years are missing, and I also notice that I can't find my main landing page in the index anymore. I know there are indexed sites out there that link to me, but they aren't being reflected anymore. Did I anger google by using SEO plugins within wordpress? I'm fairly certain I wasn't doing anything sketchy. Http://brodiegraphics.com RTOH6.png
Reporting & Analytics | | HELPeR0