Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What can we do to optimize / be mobile-friendly for PDFs?
-
I'm getting a "Your page is not mobile-friendly." notice in the SERPs for all of our PDFs. I check the pdf on the phone and it appears just fine.
-
Hi John,
Are you still seeing the 'not mobile friendly' warning in the SERPs? I checked just now and wasn't able to replicate.
-
Great question! I found this guide very helpful: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1008278
Key points from this guide:
PDF Optimizer (Learn how to reduce size, remove fonts embedding, remove unwanted data etc)
Acrobat 9
Acrobat X
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/acrobat/pro/using/WS58a04a822e3e50102bd615109794195ff-7c88.w.h tml
Conversion Process:
To create smaller size PDF, I would suggest to plan it from the beginning. As Dave mentioned- smallest size PDF, you can select this joboption from the conversion dialog box (If you have the origional document word etc.which you are creating a PDF from). This will automatically do maximum part of the job for you. So, try to keep the size lower from the beginning of PDF creation won't give you much trouble later.
Images:
You can also create small thumnails of the images and insert them in the origional document before conversion. do not resize them in the document as it still contains the origional size. Try to compress them or resize them outside the document and then finally insert them.
For example: if the image is 640x480 and you want only 50x50 in the PDF document. Try to resize it using some applications like Adobe Photoshop or MS Office picture manager (comes in MS Office suite) or using many apps freely available online. then finally insert them in the document. If you resize them in the document itself, they will still be containing the origional size.
Along with this, try downsampling the images to 72ppi (using Acrobat PDF optimizer) and use poster images instead of the videos. These images can have links pointed to the videos over website.
PDF Size:
Try to keep the PDF size between 1-2 MBs.
I hope that this helps! Good luck to you

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 to do with PDFs that rank well?
Looking at some reports, I found that a client's site has PDFs that are ranking well for niche terms and getting some traffic. What can I do to get more out of them from a marketing standpoint? The obvious issue is that a PDF doesn't have the interactivity of a site visit, where we have analytics and CTAs. Someone has to follow a link back from the PDF to the site for us to even register a visit, let alone try to get their email or have them otherwise convert. My first guess is to make landing page summaries of the PDF content that link to the PDF, and canonical the PDF to the respective landing page. Has anyone tried this, or done something else that they would recommend again in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JFA0 -
Ogranization Schema/Microformat for a content/brand website | Travel
Hi, One of our clients have a website specific to a place, for eg. California Tourism in which they publish local information related to tourism, blogs & other useful content. I want to understand how useful is to publish Organization Schema on such website mentioning the actual Organization, which in this case is a Travel Agency? Or any other schema would fit in for such websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ds9.tech0 -
Intro to programming/coding for seo
Hello, I am currently a SEO and am looking for an Intro to programming/coding course to help me implement various technical SEO tasks for my clients and the business-as the programming dept will not help me, as they do not see the value of SEO. Could someone pls recommend an online course that would introduce me to basic concepts and also specifically, the information that would help me to enhance our SEO? I would also like to better understand APIs. Thanks so much in advance for your help! Lauren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer1 -
Why is our pagerank is still only 3/10?
Hi, Our site https://soundbetter.com has been live for 2 years now, and as of yet we haven't yet been able to get our PageRank above 3/10. We have thousands of unique pages and plenty of original contextual content, we avoid duplicate content best we can, follow google's best practices for site structure, deal with any issues that come up in webmaster tools, have schema.org markup, avoid link spamming, have inbound links from authority sites (though OSE doesn't show most of them for some reason), lots of social shares to our pages and the domain has been owned by us for 12 years. Any thoughts on why we would still have a PR of 3? Thanks for helping
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD0 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Is the eCommerce site Shopify SEO friendly?
We ave a prospect client that wants to start doing SEO for his Shopify site, we are unsure if this will be SEO friendly. Will we have enough control to get great placement? Are we better off rebuilding the site for the client in an OpenCart?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?
Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links? If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0