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
-
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 -
What if page exists for desktop but not mobile?
I have a domain (no subdomains) that serves up different dynamic content for mobile/desktop pages--each having the exact same page url, kind of a semi responsive design, and will be using "Vary: User-Agent" to give Google a heads up on this setup. However, some of the pages are only valid for mobile or only valid for desktop. In the case of when a page is valid only for mobile (call it mysite.com/mobile-page-only ), Google Webmaster Tools is giving me a soft 404 error under Desktop, saying that the page does not exist, Apparently it is doing that because my program is actually redirecting the user/crawler to the home page. It appears from the info about soft 404 errors that Google is saying since it "doesn't exist" I should give the user a 404 page--which I can make it customized and give the user an option to go to the home page, or choose links from a menu, etc.. My concern is that if I tell the desktop bot that mysite.com/mobile-page-only basically is a 404 error (ie doesn't exist), that it could mess up the mobile bot indexing for that page--since it definitely DOES exist for mobile users.. Does anyone here know for sure that Google will index a page for mobile that is a 404 not found for desktop and vice versa? Obviously it is important to not remove something from an index in which it belongs, so whether Google is careful to differential the two is a very important issue. Has anybody here dealt with this or seen anything from Google that addresses it? Might one be better off leaving it as a soft 404 error? EDIT: also, what about Bing and Yahoo? Can we assume they will handle it the same way? EDIT: closely related question--in a case like mine does Google need a separate sitemap for the valid mobile pages and valid desktop pages even though most links will be in both? I can't tell from reading several q&a on this. Thanks, Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Citation/Business Directory Question...
A company I work for has two numbers... one for the std call centre and one for tracking SEO. Now, if local citation/business directory listings have the same address but different numbers, will this affect local/other SEO results? Any help is greatly appreciated! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geniusenergyltd0 -
301 redirect with /? in URL
For a Wordpress site that has the ending / in the URL with a ? after it... how can you do a 301 redirect to strip off anything after the / For example how to take this URL domain.com/article-name/?utm_source=feedburner and 301 to this URL domain.com/article-name/ Thank you for the help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Article Marketing / Article Posting
I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website. I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites. today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things: my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use) (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.) I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag. I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc. There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences. If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂 Thanks SEOMoz!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOWizards0 -
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 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0