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!
-
The more links a sitemap the it harder it is for people to follow but should be ok for search spiders.
-
Thanks for your response Chris! Good suggestion on the HTML sitemap. Any concerns if there are a couple of hundred links on this HTML site map page?
-
I would build 2 sitemaps for these files, 1 XML sitemap and 1 HTML sitemap, separate from the main sitemap and add these to Google WMT. The HTML Sitemap could also be used as a directory for visitors too.
Where possible link to the documents from the site too, this will increase the chances that the assets are indexed by Google.
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
-
Any idea why pages are not being indexed?
Hi Everyone, One section on our website is not being indexed. The product pages are, but not some of the subcategories. These are very old pages, so thought it was strange. Here is an example one one: https://www.moregems.com/loose-cut-gemstones/prasiolite-loose-gemstones.html If you take a chunk of text, it is not found in Google. No issues in Bing/Yahoo, only Google. You think it takes a submission to Search Console? Jeff
Technical SEO | | vetofunk1 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Indexing a catalogue
A client of mine has a large printed product catalogue that they post on their website as a pdf. Should I take a different approach of posting this catalogue in order to gain SEO value?
Technical SEO | | garymeld0 -
How to handle mobile site with less pages than the main site?
We are developing a mobile version of our website that will utilize responsive design/dynamic serving. About 70% of the main website will be included in the mobile version. What (if anything) should be the redirect for pages not included in the mobile version of the site? Also - for one specific section users will be redirected from that page to the homepage, what is the redirect that should be used for this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Domain recommendations for non indexed sites
For complicated internal reasons (which I swear have validity) we are starting websites that will then disallow from Google for ~1 year. Is there any value in purchasing "premium" domains with SEO juice or will we lose the value in the time we are hiding the website from Google?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Video submission sites
Hello, What are the top 5 sites for video submissions ? Any suggestions about which points should be taken into consideration when submitting videos ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
File from godaddy.com
Hi, One of our client has received a file from godaddy.com where his site is hosted. Here is the message from the client- "i submitted my site for Search Engine Visibility,but they got some issue on the site need to be fixed. i tried myself could not fix it" The site in question is - http://allkindofessays.com/ Is there any problem with the site ? Contents of the file - bplist00Ó k 0_ WebSubframeArchives_ WebSubresources_ WebMainResource L x Ï Ö Ý ] ¨ ¯ ¼ Û 6 SÓ @ F¡ Ó / :¡ Ó )¡ Ò ¡ Ô _ WebResourceResponse_ WebResourceData_ WebResourceMIMEType^WebResourceURLO cbplist00Ô Z[X$versionX$objectsY$archiverT$top † ¯ "()0 12DEFGHIJKLMNOPTUU$nullÝ !R$6S$10R$2R$7R$3S$11R$8V$classR$4R$9R$0R$5R$1€ € € € € € € € Ó #$%& [NS.relativeWNS.base€ € € _ ¢http://tags.bluekai.com/site/2748?redir=http%3A%2F%2Fsegment-pixel.invitemedia.com%2Fset_partner_uid%3FpartnerID%3D84%26partnerUID%3D%24_BK_UUID%26sscs_active%3D1Ò*+,-Z$classnameX$classesUNSURL¢./UNSURLXNSObject#A´ þ¹ –5 ÈÓ 3456=WNS.keysZNS.objects€ ¦789:;<€ €€ € €€ ¦>?@ABC€ € € € € € \Content-TypeSP3PVServerTDate^Content-LengthYBK-ServerYimage/gif_ nCP="NOI DSP COR CUR ADMo DEVo PSAo PSDo OUR SAMo BUS UNI NAV", policyref="http://tags.bluekai.com/w3c/p3p.xml"_ Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)_ Sat, 10 Sep 2011 20:23:21 GMTR62T87dfÒ*+QR_ NSMutableDictionary£QS/\NSDictionary >Ò*+VW_ NSHTTPURLResponse£XY/_ NSHTTPURLResponse]NSURLResponse_ NSKeyedArchiverÑ]_ WebResourceResponse€ # - 2 7 R X s v z } € ƒ ‡ Š ‘ ” — š ¢ ¤ ¦ ¨ ª ¬ ® ° ² ´ ¶ ¸ ¿ Ë Ó Õ × Ù ~ ƒ Ž — ¦ ¯ ¸ º Á É Ô Ö Ý ß á ã å ç é ð ò ô ö ø ú ü ( 2 < Å å è í ò 4 8 L Z l o … ^ ‡O >GIF89a ÿÿÿ!ÿ NETSCAPE2.0 !ù , L ;Yimage/gif_ ¢http://tags.bluekai.com/site/2748?redir=http%3A%2F%2Fsegment-pixel.invitemedia.com%2Fset_partner_uid%3FpartnerID%3D84%26partnerUID%3D%24_BK_UUID%26sscs_active%3D1Õ _ WebResourceTextEncodingName_ WebResourceFrameNameO 6
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
Technical SEO | | JeanieWalker0