Will a PDF Pass PageRank?
-
I created a PDF - will it pass PageRank?
-
Adding more...
The buttons from some shopping carts will work in .pdf documents. So if you write one with a parts list, you can place a buy button beside each part to make it really easy for the person to purchase.
Also, type your domain name in the pdf. That way, if people print it and want to go back to your website you might get a navigation query. Typing the URL where it can be found might do the same thing.
-
Very interesting discussion indeed. I wonder if "creating a workpath" for text would make it easier to read. But I guess a OCR is going to have a difficult time associating the actual text with the link regardless.
-
We make our links very obvious. I would not try to hide them because I want them clicked (it is hard to monetize a .pdf but easy to monetize an .html page - so I want the visitor to get onto my .html pages).
You can lock .pdf documents so that they can not be edited. Then other webmasters are free to post them on their own domain and give me backlinks. Of, course they could rewrite their own just as any other content can be spun or rewritten.
-
I'll help you by adding one.
... And a thumbs up well spent.
-
What an interesting topic. Has anyone done any testing around effectiveness of PDF vs HTML resources and whether it treats anchor text in the same way?
-
Thanks a ton EGOL, I have been looking around for more info on this subject for quite a while. What are your thoughts on how to create the links? Is it considered black hat tactics to place invisible links in those pdf's? My thinking here is that I know competitors will start stealing our pdf documents to use for their own websites. I was thinking of placing invisible links on some key phrases that link to product pages, and then when competitors upload our pdf's to their site, we get backlinks from their websites. Does that make sense, and does it seem like a viable strategy or a potentially penalizing one?
-
Thank you. I really like this subject and enjoyed preparing that answer!
-
Wow, way to give an absolutely excellent answer. I wish I could give more than 1 thumbs up!
-
Links in .pdf documents will be displayed in your Google Webmaster Tools Backlinks, they will accumulate pagerank (I have some PR6 pdf documents), and they will pass pagerank.
It is a good idea to place links into .pdf documents that you give away on the web not only for pagerank reasons but also to give users an easy link to visit your site for more information. Think about usability when you create .pdf documents in the same ways that you think about usability for your website.
Also, if you complete the "properties" attributes of .pdf documents you can give them a title that will appear in the SERPs like a title tag on an .html webpage. I get lots of traffic from the SERPs that come straight into my .pdf documents and then click a link in the document that takes them to a relevant page on my website.
Finally... in addition to .pdf documents you can also get viable backlinks and clickthroughs from .ppt (PowerPoint) .xls (Excel) and other types of files. Consider allowing other webmasters to include them on their site. That way they can bring you links from other domains.
-
From what i have seen its a little unclear, and would largely be dependant on how you create the pdf. Provided your pdf has been created using a text editor for the text (and not mad up of a bunch of images) then if pdf's are crawled - at least you stand a chance of the text and so on ranking in the first place. (You can google search by file type, including pdf, so one would assume they should rank in their own right if tagged and as text).
Whether a pdf will pass rank or not? I would suggest it should - provided it actually ranks itself in the first place (sounds obvious I know).
-
Depending on how it's uploaded on to the page, the page can still build links to it and gain in authority and trust. The content of the PDF will likely not be able to be crawled by the engines though.
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
-
What will SEO be like in the 2020's?
Hey guys, I would love to hear your thoughts on how you think SEO will change in the 2020's. The 2010's saw some pretty cool stuff like Panda, Penguin, penalties for non-mobile-friendly, non-secure and slow loading sites. What will be more or less important for SEO's in the 2020's than today? How will machine learning and AI change SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreenHatWeb0 -
SEO for Product Pages Deal that will last One Day Only
For an Ecommerce website I am required to create two pages. 1) One that will be displaying the "Deal of the day", which is basically a summary of the product on sale and another 2) product page where the actual product-deal resides. "Deal of the day" page Fixed url e.g. homepage.com/deal-of-the-day Product description summary Go to product-deal & Buy Now Button Content changes everyday Product Deal Page Similar to other products, sometimes will be a group of products, coupons etc. Product deals will be stored for later re-use Not visible from the main product catalogue These products are most of the time the same products from the catalogue but different copy Recommendations? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raulreyes0 -
Will SEO cause a drop in the number of impressions?
Hello, I have been a member of the Moz community for a long time. I very seldom ask questions here but this time I really need your help to make sure I will not make mistakes that will negatively affect my site. My site monetizes according to the number of impressions visualized by the users who visit it. I now want to try to optimize it by using all those nice SEO techniques I have learned through Moz. My goal is to make sure that if I use the various SEO strategies, I will still be able to obtain the high number of impressions I get now. If not, I prefer to leave the situation untouched and I will not start optimizing the site for SEO. Please kindly read the situation below and give me a little support to make sure I am doing the right thing. I would like to ask for your professional advice to solve and issue related to duplicate content. Please visit my site: www.chhedonna.it. The sitemap has indexed 21.890 articles, but if I digit the command 'site:www.chedonna.it', I obtain 158.000 results.I believe that the duplicated content has emerged due to three errors I would like to indicate in order for you to tell me whether my interpretation is correct or not: The article writers made a mistake in that although the content of the articles is different, they have employed the same title for all of them. Therefore, you can see 5 articles with similar/duplicated Tag Titles but the content of said articles is different. For example, http://www.chedonna.it/attualita/cronaca-rosagossip/2012/12/03/heidi-klum-senza-trucco-e-parrucco-foto and http://www.chedonna.it/attualita/cronaca-rosagossip/2012/12/03/heidi-klum-senza-trucco-e-parrucco-foto-2/ are different articles (i.e., the content of the articles is different from each other) that have been published using the same titles. If I inserted the 'follow-noindex' tag to 3 of the 4 duplicates, as shown in the example above, would that be a solution? I fear that if I did insert the follow-noindex, I would cause a drop in the number of impressions visualized by my site's users. It is important to point out, in fact, that I monetize the site via the number of impressions I generate. Therefore, it is fundamental that I do not compromise the number of impressions that the site gets, if I try to optimize it for SEO reasons. On the other hand, I believe that the idea to operate via a 'rel canonical' would not be right, considering that the content of every post having the same title is different, that is, the articles are different even if they focus on the same topic. Also, I would not find it beneficial to use a '301 redirect', since the number of duplicated Titles Tags is very consistent. 2. The second error concerns the duplicate content due to the images that have been included in the articles. For instance, http://www.chedonna.it/che-donna-di-mondo/fare-la-valigia/2012/08/06/campeggio-vacanza-in-liberta/attachment/tenda/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-donna-di-mondo/fare-la-valigia/2012/08/06/campeggio-vacanza-in-liberta/attachment/tenda-2/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-miss/2012/12/04/tatuaggi-fiore-di-loto-significato-e-foto/attachment/tatuaggio-fiore-di-loto-2/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-miss/2013/03/15/tatuaggi-fiore-di-loto-significato-e-foto-2/attachment/tatuaggio-fiore-di-loto-2-2/. I could solve this problem by preventing the media indexing. But I fear that this would produce a very high number of '404 error' messages. If such a thing did happen, my site would stop monetizing overall and I cannot allow this to occur, as you can understand. My very important question is the following: if I prevent the indexing of the photos, will I get in return a drop in the number of impressions that my site would normally generate? 3. Duplicate content generated by the indexing of archive subpages. For example: http://www.chedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/ http://www.chedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/page2/ http://wwwchedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/page3/ If I prevented the media indexing, will I get in return a drop in the number of impressions and many 404 errors? Thank you very much for taking the time to help me sort out this very important issue. Cheers, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Duplicate Content Error because of passed through variables
Hi everyone... When getting our weekly crawl of our site from SEOMoz, we are getting errors for duplicate content. We generate pages dynamically based on variables we carry through the URL's, like: http://www.example123.com/fun/life/1084.php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTSupp
http://www.example123.com/fun/life/1084.php?top=true ie, ?top=true is the variable being passed through. We are a large site (approx 7000 pages) so obviously we are getting many of these duplicate content errors in the SEOMoz report. Question: Are the search engines also penalizing for duplicate content based on variables being passed through? Thanks!0 -
If you have multiple schema types on a page, which Rich Snippet will display in Google?
We currently have product schema on product pages and will now be adding video schema to our product pages. According to Google they state you can have multiple schemas on a page, do you know if you have a product schema and a video schema which rich snippet will display in Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gatorpool0 -
Will Google read my page title and H1?
Dim strTitle : strTitle = "The Title Of My Page" <title>Company name - <%=strTitle%></title> <%=strTitle%> Will Google be able to read this? When I view source the relevant information is in the tags but I'm wondering if Google hates this or not? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
The Site: search and Flow of PageRank
It is my understanding that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com the results are like every other SERP in that the most authoritative pages are ranked higher. So obviously I would expect my homepage to be first (in most cases), then followed by main category pages, etc. My question is has anybody ever seen disturbing results when doing this (i.e. pages that should have no authority outranking main category pages)? Is this always an issue with site structure or can you think of other factors that may cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | purch0 -
Should I change site link structure? Will that make things worse?
I've got an Exact Match Domain that has just started to do well in Google for say the past year. I've always received good rankings from Bing and Yahoo but I love the traffic levels that Google sends. Long story short on the 25th according to webmaster tools, my impressions on their search engine have been destroyed. No problems, not de-indexed, just not showing my site anymore. I like this site and have been careful, built some links and the anchor text is suspect but also not suspect because its the same as the domain. What I feel the problem may be is the site structure. I set it up a long time ago like this: Exact-Match-keyword. com/ Exact-match-keyword.php/state I thought it looked kinda spammy at the time but also thought it may help. Now I'm wondering if I shorten all the page titles to the state name and 301 the old links if I will regain rankings, or if I may lose some from other search engines. I used to think Penguins were cute......
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TEGS1