PDFs and indexing

[TeamacPaints]

Hello and good morning.

I work for a paint manufacturing company in the UK on their seo campaigns across a couple of websites, this is my question. as paint and chemicals require data and tech sheets by law, available to be downloadable for said product, should these be included in the sitemap, we auto generate our sitemaps which they include these files, with low priorities and never change in terms of name etc.

they basically have a name of say 092847.pdf for example which cannot be changed, but from an seo view this doesn't mean a thing?  so theres my question should they be included and would they carry any value?

[TeamacPaints]

thank you, I'm not saying they couldn't be changed it would just cause a lot of stress for our labs and tech guys who create these and work by the number. were as having a naming structure things would become a mess and everything up in the air.

I will look into the back end keywords, authors, company name which may give them some sort of impact from what I read on the link above.

[Raydon]

in addition to Rober's post above, I suggest you see this, this and this

there is SOME value if one cares to get it out of them or if one really needs all possible score (new site, rushy client, etc)

hope this clears it up a bit

[magicrob]

Hi

Sitemaps - yes, include anything in Sitemaps that you want users to be able to find, so the more ways you can lead a Search Engine to it, the better.

Filename - it would help if you could change the filenames to include keywords, but if that's not an option then there are other things you can do to optimise each PDF.

There's a good overview of optimising PDFs here - How To Optimize PDF Documents For Search

As that post mentions, include links back to your site for maximum value, especially if these documents are shared on other websites. Also, a bit of branding within each PDF (just add a logo) could help you out in some way.

Hope that's helpful

[siteoptimo]

Case A:
If the content of the PDF's is valuable, if it contains also some text about the product, I would make them indexable. It will make niche searchers find you.
You might want to make a separate sitemap for these PDF's, just to keep things clean.

Case B:
If it's only numbers and very technical jibber jabber, I wouldn't let it index, since Google won't understand it either.

Update with an interesting story:
A client of mine also had technical PDF sheets online. He has put a lot of effort in that. There were a few (4-5) competitors using direct links to the PDF's. After a while, we referred all that competitor traffic to a special landing page trying to convince why my client is a better deal. It's still online on some of the sites, since some competitors never really checked the PDF's.
Made my client very happy.

[TomRayner]

Hey there

I can't imagine them having any SEO value, but I can't see the PDFs doing any harm either.

PDFs are crawlable and indexable by the search engines, so I would want to keep it in your sitemap for the user.  I'm quite familiar with your industry (my dad worked with providing paint and chemical coatings) and I can imagine your target audience being quite specific in their searches, looking for products by code and specifications.  A PDF would probably be the ideal solution for this and so having it indexed and sitting on your domain could bring in some organic traffic.

I'd make sure that the PDFs are branded if possible containing clear links back to your site, in order to funnel any long-tail traffic back to your homepage and sales pages.