Are flip books - pdf readers on websites SEO friendly?
-
I have a client with bar, most of their content is menus that are displayed in a flip book format.
Is this content indexed by search engines, and if so, are they of any value for ranking?
-
Oh, just spotted this video that refers to your question:
-
Thanks for the reply Federico, the link were very helpful
-
Thanks Paul
Great advice
-
Most FlipBooks work by converting the pdf into a Flash file and then embedding that Flash file into the host site's page, Stephen. The contents of this Flash file can't be effectively read or indexed by the search engines, so they essentially provide no SEO value at all.
One way around this is to provide a download link to the actual PDF file on the page in addition to the flipbook. That way, the search engines can find it and rank it. (there are a number of best-practices for optimising PDFs that should be followed for best indexing and ranking.)
In addition, you can use the site's .htaccess file to insert a canonical header into the PDF pointing back at the menu page it's hosted on to try to consolidate ranking value in the main page instead of in the pdf if you wish.
As Federico says, the ideal for crawling and ranking is to have the menu contents in plain html on the page,but if that's not possible, the above solutions will still be effective.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Google indexes PDF contents and files almost like regular HTML. Links are followed, you can block indexing, etc. Just like regular HTML. The only thing Google can't index from PDFs are images, unless you have it in HTML format elsewhere.
I would definitely recommend converting those PDF menus to regular HTML.
You can find more info here:
What file types can Google index?
Can google fully index pdf files?
Hope that helps!
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
-
Newbie SEO ?: Does my About page URL have to contain the word About?
New to WordPress and SEO. Built and launched my website last week. The URL was originally domain/about. However, I installed Yoast plugin and it told me "about" was a stop word. So, without too much thought (my first problem), I changed the url (before Google crawled me) to clearwingcommunications.com/storytelling. Since then, I've noticed that sites I know are optimized have their URL with the word "about." So, is this considered a bad practice? My site HAS been crawled at this point. If I change it back to About and do a 301 redirect, does that hurt reporting? Thanks for your help! Christy
On-Page Optimization | | christyr0 -
Changing url (permalink) structure of website??
Currently I'm working on SEO of one website www.mocomi.com. I want to change url (permalink) structure of entire website which has more than 5000 pages. Currently website have structure of http://mocomi.com/tenali-raman-the-kings-condition/ Which I want to change it to http://mocomi.com/fun/stories/tenali-raman/tenali-raman-the-kings-condition/ Likewise I want to change entire website permalink url structure to make site architecture more SEO friendly. Which means I'am going to add only categories & subcategories before actual link. Kindly guide with following questions which I need to move forward with this step. How much is it worth to change URL structure? Checklist or factors I need to consider while making this decision? Is it a good practice to change URL's of entire website at once or Should I change it in Parts? How much time it takes google to rank those urls again? Which are the best practices to do so?
On-Page Optimization | | Mocomi1 -
How Much Does Punctuation of a Word Effect SEO?
I have a page on a site that is targeted for "mens hair cut" and I have received a F for the grade. The content on the page uses "men's" throughout the content. (proper punctuation) When I re-graded the page with "men's hair cut" the page received a B grade. My question is, does mens v.s men's make a different for on-page SEO? Should my targeted keywords include "men's" rather than "mens"?
On-Page Optimization | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
301 Redirect and SEO Rankings
I recently restructured my webpage URL's (about 300 ~ 75% of my total website) to make the URL paths more SEO friendly. Within a few hours of restructuring the pages, I did a 301 redirect to my old URL's and pointed them to the new pages. I have seen ~ 50% drop in organic traffic. I started the restructuring exercise 14 days ago and finished it a few hours back. I have 3 questions: How long will it take for me to recover my old traffic. Will I recover most of it or some of it? Due to a glitch in the specified path, some old URL's were wrongly redirected (this happened with 9 pages to be exact). I will explain exactly what happened: www.redirct.com/superseonow1 ---- redirected to ---- www.redirectnow.com/seonow1 **/superseonow was 301 redirected to /seonow. After 3 days I realize that /superseonow1 was actually /supernow1. The same thing happened to 9 pages - /superseonow2, /superseonow3 ..... ** I have removed all the wrong redirects. When I tried to enter the correct (old) paths now and 301 redirect them to the new paths, the page was not found using the old paths. Should I redirect the old paths to the New ones even now? 3. Finally, in how much time after you change the page structure should you use the 301 redirect. Since I had two different teams working on this job, there could have been up to a 24 hour gap between the redirection.
On-Page Optimization | | rajatsharma0 -
Duplication About PDF Files on Website
Hello, My site's URL (web address) is: http://www.vostastores.com/ Above is the Our Website URL. We are in the process of Upgrading Our Website and for that we are adding all Details of each and every products. One of the thing that we are planning to do is to get Manufacturer's product PDF files on our Website which the manufacturer already have on their website. So our Question is that Since the manufacturer has the file on their website and we want to add the same on our website, Will be there any Duplication issue? If yes, then please provide us with a Solution by which we can add the same on our website. Thanks & Regards.
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit0 -
Domain Name and On-Page SEO
Where are the best places to put your Domain name in On-Page SEO? My domain name ends in .net so I would like to put it as many places as possible to brand the .net . On the analysis page I have found out that it is not a good idea to put it in the title page...but that is what the SEO guy I hired told me to do. Thanks, Utah Tiger
On-Page Optimization | | Boodreaux0 -
Hotspot area for SEO
Hi, we have an online store: http://www.redwrappings.com.au/ There's been a debate regarding which area is recognised to be the most important place/hotspot for SEO: Free delivery van area (top left panel) OR Top menu navigation Given that if you look at the page html source code, the top navigation loads last and the free delivery fan area is the first one to be read in the html source code. We did this because we want the body page content (h1 & text content) to be read first by search engine robot & also the body can load faster for the user. Is this the right thing to do or we better off load the top navigation first? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Essentia0 -
Panda Update and Website Content
According to the Panda Update information, website content that is or was written to help with SEO is now not the best idea, but content that is very informative and interesting is the way to go. But if you have an Ecommerce Website how can you write informative bookmarking content, if each product you sell is very similar, and the information for the product is just details about the product. Its hard to write good content for an eCommerce website. We have 300+ products that are all similar, but if we would write content about each product, it would be similar and not interesting to read. People just want to purchase the product, not read a bunch of content. How do websites that sell many products and not content driven websites rank well in search?
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0
