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
-
Google Site Search & SEO benefits
Hi all - I've had a comb through the forums here but can't seem to find any updates on whether there any tangible benefits for using Google Site Search. We're currently exploring using Lucene, Oracle Endeca, & Google Site Search - but from what I've read so far there are no quantifiable benefits for choose Google over any others. Everything I've read is rumor-mill...anybody have experience or references? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | kenno690 -
Duplicate Content on our own website
Our website sells tickets for events. We also have an news articles section with information about events / artists / venues. From time to time we release a product page and a related news article on a separate page. Some of the content in the news article would be perfect for our product page. Essentially its our product page we want too rank. Would it harm our SEO if we had some of the same content on both of these pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexogilvie0 -
Client is not ranking on Google For Brand Name Search but is on Yahoo and Bing
We have a mobile app development client that recently 6 months ago changed their domain name to www.FSStudio.com. So they are concerned that they don’t rank on the first page for the brandname phrase “FS Studio” On Google. They do rank on the first page for this phrase in Yahoo or Bing. But why is Google returning search results for stuff like Free Studio? I know this fairly obvious question which the answers may be that they need more authority or backlinks because their name happens to be a fairly competitive search for stuff that is unrelated. Any suggestions? We are going to be optimizing and creating a lot more content. Is this just that they need to mention their name FS Studio more frequently throughout their website? Here is a screenshot from Moz’s Keyword difficulty and SERP Analysis tool. agwlY9i.png
On-Page Optimization | | vabmediaseo0 -
Table text : Does that influences the website's ranking ?
We are currently working on a new page for one of our clients and there is A LOT of writing, so A LOT of differents pages. If I decide to put the texts on table text instead of creating a link for another page, will that influence the ranking in any way ? I've been a web writer for only a year now and still try to figure out how to optimize the written part. Thank you for your answers.
On-Page Optimization | | marketingmedia.ca0 -
Ecommerce internal search results pages
I'm working on a ecommerce site that allows product search results pages to be sorted a variety of ways (best selling, newest, by price). Each of these search filters creates a new url i.e. /all/best/1 and /all/best/2; /all/new/1 and /all/new/2; etc. These search results pages have been indexed and the site is receiving enough organic traffic from these pages that I don't want to add noindex,follow to them. I am planning on implementing rel=prev,rel=next for each filter, but I'm concerned about duplicate content considering I can't create unique meta data for each page. Should I canonical all pages to the first search results page without filters applied? Or any other ideas on how I should proceed?
On-Page Optimization | | ang0 -
We have 5 postions on page 2 in a google search, but none on page 1\. How can we fix this?
For one of our most important key phrases we have 5 listings on page 2 but none on page 1. We are an ecommerce company, the key phrase we're trying for is a Top Level Category name for us, so the 5 links we have on googles second page for the key phrase (in order) are the appropriate top level category page, the sites home page and than three sub categories of that top level category. So while that all makes sense, can't we convince google to concentrate all that link power/juice into just the top level category page? Hopefully bumping it to first page rank? The 5 ranks are 11-15
On-Page Optimization | | absoauto0 -
SEO and Pagination on search results
Hi Our new site is still in beta mode, and I just wanted to check from an SEO perspective that on search results and on the pagination at the bottom of the page, is there anything we need to do so its compatible with the search engines and not have duplicate content issues etc I have implemented search friendly URL's, but I would welcome any other issues or suggestions you have that will help improve the sites SEO performance The URL of a search results page is http://www.cheapfindergames.com/category-arcade-and-platform
On-Page Optimization | | ocelot0 -
Website Content
Is it bad to have html pages on a blog? I converted a completely HTML site to wordpress, but havd hundreds of article pages that are still html.
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0