Dealing with PDFs?
-
Hello fellow mozzers!
One of our clients does an excellent job of providing excellent content, and we don't even have to nag them about it (imagine that!). This content is usually centered around industry reports, financial analyses, and economic forcasts; however, they always post them in the form of pdfs.
How does Google view PDF's, and is there a way to optimize them? Ideally, I am going to try to get this client set up with a blog-like plateform that will use HTML text, rather than PDF's, but I wanted to see what info was out there for PDF's.
Thanks!
-
Thank you Keri for the helpful resource. I actually ended up doing all of those things for our client. Also, I found out that the default Drupal 6 robot.txt file, does not allow the search engines to index pdf's, images, and flash. Therefore, one must eliminate the disallow: /sites/ from the Robot.txt file.
-
This doesn't address ranking, but the YOUmoz post does talk about best practices for optimizing PDF content and may help you. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search
-
To be honest Dana, outside of the basics mentioned, I tended not to go overboard and many of them started to rank naturally as Google spidered the site. Just remember to give the link to the PDF a strong anchor text and if possible, add a little content around it to explain what visitors can expect in the document. Also remember to add a link to Adobe so that they can download the free reader if they dont have it already.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Andy
-
Thank you iNet SEO, Excellent resource...
I was also wondering if anyone had any posts / experience with understanding the indexing and ranking of PDF content?
-
Yes, you can optomise PDF's - have a read of this as it seems to cover most points
http://www.seoconsultants.com/pdf/seo
Sorry, I forgot to add that PDF's are useful for those who are wishing to download something to read at a later stage or whilst offline. Don't rush to advise them that HTML is the way to go unless it actually is. I have printed off many a PDF and taken it into meetings with me.
Regards,
Andy
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 deal with Pages not present anymore in the site
Hi, we need to cut out from the catalog some destinations for our tour operator, so basically we need to deal with destination pages and tour pages not present anymore on the site. What do you think is the best approach to deal with this pages to not loose ranking? Do you think is a good approach to redirect with 301's these pages to the home page or to the general catalog page or do you suggest another approach? tx for your help!
Technical SEO | | Dreamrealemedia0 -
Why are only PDFs on my client's site being indexed, and not actual pages?
My client has recently built a new site (we did not build this), which is a subdomain of their main site. The new site is: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/uk/en/. (Their main domain is: http://itelligencegroup.com/uk/) This new Addstore site has recently gone live (in the past week or so) and so far, Google appears to have indexed 56 pdf files that are on the site, but it hasn't indexed any of the actual web pages yet. I can't figure out why though. I've checked the robots.txt file for the site which appears to be fine: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/robots.txt. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti0 -
Best way to deal with over 1000 pages of duplicate content?
Hi Using the moz tools i have over a 1000 pages of duplicate content. Which is a bit of an issue! 95% of the issues arise from our news and news archive as its been going for sometime now. We upload around 5 full articles a day. The articles have a standalone page but can only be reached by a master archive. The master archive sits in a top level section of the site and shows snippets of the articles, which if a user clicks on them takes them to the full page article. When a news article is added the snippets moves onto the next page, and move through the page as new articles are added. The problem is that the stand alone articles can only be reached via the snippet on the master page and Google is stating this is duplicate content as the snippet is a duplicate of the article. What is the best way to solve this issue? From what i have read using a 'Meta NoIndex' seems to be the answer (not that i know what that is). from what i have read you can only use a canonical tag on a page by page basis so that going to take to long. Thanks Ben
Technical SEO | | benjmoz0 -
How do I deal with Duplicate content?
Hi, I'm trying SEOMOZ and its saying that i've got loads of duplicate content. We provide phone numbers for cities all over the world, so have pages like this... https://www.keshercommunications.com/Romaniavoipnumbers.html https://www.keshercommunications.com/Icelandvoipnumbers.html etc etc. One for every country. The question is, how do I create pages for each one without it showing up as duplicate content? Each page is generated by the server, but Its impossible to write unique text for each one. Also, the competition seem to have done the same but google is listing all their pages when you search for 'DID Numbers. Look for DIDWW or MyDivert.
Technical SEO | | DanFromUK0 -
How best to deal with www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html
Firstly, this is for an .asp site - and all my usual ways of fixing this (e.g. via htaccess) don't seem to work. I'm working on a site which has www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html - both URL's resolve to the same page/content. If I simply drop a rel canonical into the page, will this solve my dupe content woes? The canonical tag would then appear in both www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html cases. If the above is Ok, which version should I be going with? - or - Thanks in advance folks,
Technical SEO | | Creatomatic
James @ Creatomatic0 -
Ensuring Assets (PDFs, PowerPoint Files, Word Docs, etc.) are Indexable on Site
Hi there - I'm working on an educational site in which users will be able to search our repository of PDF articles, PowerPoint files, and so on through an on-site search engine. What is the best way to ensure each of these documents/assets are indexable by Google since they technically don't reside on an HTML page....they are just pulled up if the user searches for them? The site itself is just a few pages, but the files, articles, and videos in the repository are in the hundreds. Should I just name and tag them properly and make sure they're all included in an XML site map? Anything else suggested? Thanks very much!
Technical SEO | | MedThinkCommunications0 -
What is the best way to deal with pages whose content changes?
My site features businesses that offers activities for kids. Each business has its own page on my site. Business pages contains a listing of different activities that organization is putting on (such as events, summer camps, drop-in activities). Some businesses only offer seasonal activities (for example, during Christmas break and summer camps). The rest of the year, the business has no activities -- the page is empty. This is creating 2 problems. It's poor user experience (which I can fix no problem) but it also is thin content and sometimes treated as duplicate content. What's the best way to deal with pages whose content can be quite extensive at certain points of the year and shallow or empty at other parts? Should I include a meta ROBOTS tag to not index when there is no content, and change the tag to index when there is content? Should I just ignore this problem? Should I remove the page completely and do a redirect? Would love to know people's thoughts.
Technical SEO | | ChatterBlock0 -
Dealing with hundreds of spam pages caused by a hacker
A couple of my sites have recently been hacked with the hacker managing to overwrite lots of my pages with their own spam products and also adding in lots of (hundreds) pages that they have created themselves. I have rectified this in so far as removing folders that the hacker used to over write my pages so my original pages are now back showing the correct content and also removed all the hundres of new pages that they had managed to instantly add. I appreciate that google will find and re-crawl all my genuine pages so the correct content is being displayed and indexed for them but what is the best method for dealing with the hundreds of extra spam ages that google had managed to crawl but have now been deleted so there are loads of 404 page not founds in google?
Technical SEO | | Wardy0