Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to tell if PDF content is being indexed?
-
I've searched extensively for this, but could not find a definitive answer.
We recently updated our website and it contains links to about 30 PDF data sheets. I want to determine if the text from these PDFs is being archived by search engines.
When I do this search http://bit.ly/rRYJPe (google - site:www.gamma-sci.com and filetype:pdf) I can see that the PDF urls are getting indexed, but does that mean that their content is getting indexed?
I have read in other posts/places that if you can copy text from a PDF and paste it that means Google can index the content. When I try this with PDFs from our site I cannot copy text, but I was told that these PDFs were all created from Word docs, so they should be indexable, correct?
Since WordPress has you upload PDFs like they are an image could this be causing the problem?
Would it make sense to take the time and extract all of the PDF content to html?
Thanks for any assistance, this has been driving me crazy.
-
Kyle,
Thanks for the quick response. The data is being displayed in the title and meta description field. I also did some searches for specific terms with my parameter search from our site and filetype:pdf, which shows that the content is being indexed. It also shows that the PDF titles and meta descriptions are not optimized, so I have some work there.
Thanks,
Anthony
-
Is the data being displayed in the title and meta description in the SERP content from the PDF?
If so, then yes, they are being indexed/crawled.
Regards,
Kyle
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
-
Discovered - currently not indexed issue
Hello all, We have a sitemap with URLs that have mostly user generated content. Profile Overview section. Where users write about their services and some other things. Out of 46K URLs, only 14K are valid according to search console and 32K URLs are excluded. Out of these 32K, 28K are "Discovered - currently not indexed". We can't really update these pages as they have user generated content. However we do want to leverage all these pages to help us in our SEO. So the question is how do we make all of these pages indexable? If anyone can help in the regard, please let me know. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | akashkandari0 -
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
No Index PDFs
Our products have about 4 PDFs a piece, which really inflates our indexed pages. I was wondering if I could add REL=No Index to the PDF's URL? All of the files are on a file server, so they are embedded with links on our product pages. I know I could add a No Follow attribute, but I was wondering if any one knew if the No Index would work the same or if that is even possible. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MonicaOConnor0 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TomLondon0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
How to determine which pages are not indexed
Is there a way to determine which pages of a website are not being indexed by the search engines? I know Google Webmasters has a sitemap area where it tells you how many urls have been submitted and how many are indexed out of those submitted. However, it doesn't necessarily show which urls aren't being indexed.
Technical SEO | | priceseo1 -
How to change noindex to index?
Hey, I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.' How can i change this so my pages get indexed? I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated.. Please let me know Many thanks, Jamie P.s Im using WordPress 3.5 And i have the XML sitemap plugin And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
Technical SEO | | markgreggs0 -
De-indexed from Google
Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL. The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | rikmon0