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
-
How i can increase my page authority?
Hi, I have website and i want to increase my page authority. My website is latestdatabase.com I have making more backlinks but not good page authority so far. Please give me suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LatestMailingDatabase1 -
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 -
Disallow: /jobs/? is this stopping the SERPs from indexing job posts
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesHancocks1
I was wondering what this would be used for as it's in the Robots.exe of a recruitment agency website that posts jobs. Should it be removed? Disallow: /jobs/?
Disallow: /jobs/page/*/ Thanks in advance.
James0 -
What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Creating Redirect Maps -To include PDFs or Not to include PDFs?
When creating a redirect map for a site re-build or domain change, it is necessary to include .PDFs or any other non-HTML URLs? Do PDFs even carry "seo juice" over? When switching CMS, does it even matter to include them? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emilydavidson0 -
Redirect wordpress from /%post_id%/%postname%/ to /blog/%postname%/
Hi what is the code to redirect wordpress blog from site.com/%post_id%/%postname%/ to site.com/blog/%postname%/ We are moving the site to a new server and new url structure. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90