Google indexing PDF's
-
Hello,
We work heavily on E-commerce SEO and recently Google has started to index PDF pages (Datasheets) added to the product pages instead of the actual product pages. Has anyone else noticed this at all?
Seems to have got worse over the last month or so.
Thanks
-
Did you know that some shopping cart buttons can be embedded in pdf documents?
You can also place links in your pdf documents to direct traffic to product pages.
Or you can extract the info from pdf documents and publish it on the bottom of your product pages.
-
Yes, Google crawls PDFs but I don't think they crawl them "instead" of html. If anything, perhaps your PDFs are better optimized for the popular keywords than the pages..?
As for your question, no I have not noticed any changes in the way Google crawls PDFs. I personally made the decision a few months ago to no-crawl our PDF folder to avoid them being indexed as I saw no reason for it.
I friggin hate PDFs and if it wasn't for certain members of certain departments of a certain company using certain browsers like a certain Internet Explorer 7 and demanding certain PDFs to send to certain clients I certainly would never use them.
Whew.
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
-
Massive unexplained organic traffic drop; disappeared from Google
Hi there,
Search Behavior | | katelynroberts
Our site has experienced a huge organic traffic drop, specifically from Google. The drop occurred on Feb 19 and I've got no clue why it happened. We have not made any significant changes to the website and it doesn't look like there was an algorithm update last week. We don't have any Google penalties or indexing issues noted, and the drop isn't specific to any particular segment/region/keyword. What am I missing? Any advice or insight is super duper appreciated. Our site is a Wordpress/WooCommerice e-commerce site with a blog and long-standing #1 ranks for keywords related to our main product offering. Screen Shot 2024-02-26 at 3.12.25 PM.png
Screen Shot 2024-02-26 at 3.07.52 PM.png0 -
How does Google treat significant content changes to web pages and how should I flag them as such?
I have several pages (~30) that I have plans to overhaul. The URLs will be identical and the theme of the content will be the same (still talking about the same widgets, using the same language) but I will be adding a lot more useful information for users, specifically including things that I think will help with my fairly high bounce rate on these pages. I believe the changes will be significant enough for Google to notice, I was wondering if it goes "this is basically a new page now, I will treat it as such and rank accordingly" or does it go "well this content was rubbish last time I checked so it is probably still not great". My second question is, is there a way I can get Google to specifically crawl a page it already knows about with fresh eyes? I know in the Search Console I can ask Google to index new pages, and I've experimented with if I can ask it to crawl a page I know Google knows (it allows me to) but I couldn't see any evidence of it doing anything with that index. Some background The reason I'm doing this is because I noticed when these pages first ranked, they did very well (almost all first / second page for the terms I wanted). After about two weeks I've noticed them sliding down. It doesn't look like the competition is getting any better so my running theory is they ranked well to begin with because they are well linked internally and the content is good/relevant and one of the main things negatively impacting me (that google couldn't know at the time) is bounce rate.
Search Behavior | | tosbourn0 -
Google smacked my site and dropped all rankings, can't find out why
I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks
Search Behavior | | s-s0 -
Anyone facing issues with Google Analytics today?
For some reason all pages on our site seem to be taking ages to load as they seem to be getting stuck at the "waiting for google-analytics.com"! Anyone else facing similar issues today?
Search Behavior | | prsntsnh0 -
Personalised Geo-targeted results - How does Google pass link juice?
Hello, Many websites now serve specific home page offers based on the location of the customer, my question is, how does link juice flow around a site when the links (this case from the homepage) are served up based on a visitors location? Internal links from your homepage are valuable for ranking that product well in the SERPs so how does Google deal with this? So, for example, a car hire website based in the UK. If you arrive on the care hire website sat in Manchester (Northern UK city), on the homepage the website serves offers of car hire deals in Manchester, Leeds, London and international destinations. If you arrived on this website from London (Southern UK City), you would not see the Manchester link at all but London, and other cities in the South. In this case, when Google crawls the car hire website, it will see internal links but a)which version and b) is there any way of sharing this link value around? Basically, we want to understand if Manchester in this case will get the benefit of an internal homepage link from Google even though we only show Manchester to people FROM Manchester, OR, do Google only give juice based on one version of the website, a generic UK version? Or to put it another way, is there any way of cashing in on both geo-targetting the customer based on their location AND getting link juice from those geo-specific home page links? Perhaps there is some code or way of telling Google that people from Manchester (a certain % of our visitors) will see a homepage internal link for Manchester that will pass some small % link value?
Search Behavior | | xoffie0 -
When Googling site:mydomain.com what does listing order tell us?
To find all the pages on my site that are indexed by Google I can search using site:mydomain.com and it gives pages of results. But what does the order of results relate to? Is it page rank or strength? My list of pages doesn't appear to be in order of strength. And it's definitely not by age or alphabetical...
Search Behavior | | GregB1230 -
Google Analytics: advanced segment for hour of day
Cioa from 17 Degrees C cloudy Wetherby UK 🙂 In Google analytics I want to report specifically on Blackberry Mobile traffic next to hour if the day. Whilst this customised report I ripped off did the job @ http://bit.ly/hourdays I only resorted to this after battling with advanced segments thinking I could do the same thing. So my question is please how can I get this report http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/hrs-day-examplecopy_zps4f15d4a1.jpg by building it via advanced segments and not ripping off via http://bit.ly/hourdays Grazie tanto,
Search Behavior | | Nightwing
David0 -
Google ranks our competitor above us on 1000's of branded queires!!!
Hi all, I have noticed a very bizarre phenomenon in Google SERPs. When I search for a branded keyworks [Product + our brand].
Search Behavior | | ref.price
Amazon.fr appear above us on thousands of results. Google even ranks Amazon above us for queries like [ PriceMinister google plus]. I have tried to ask Google about it but I can’t seem to get an answer. Here is the topic I posted on Google’s forum: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/DFvTPr14o_o This seems like a mistake on Google’s side, some kind of semantic association with our two brands! Basically they are sending our customers to our main competitor even though they specifically searched for our brand (PriceMinister). I find the phenomenon quite interesting for the SEO community and frustrating for our company. Does anyone have ideas on this one? Do you think it's a bug from Google? Cheers Oliver0