Dealing with PDFs?
-
Hello fellow mozzers!
One of our clients does an excellent job of providing excellent content, and we don't even have to nag them about it (imagine that!). This content is usually centered around industry reports, financial analyses, and economic forcasts; however, they always post them in the form of pdfs.
How does Google view PDF's, and is there a way to optimize them? Ideally, I am going to try to get this client set up with a blog-like plateform that will use HTML text, rather than PDF's, but I wanted to see what info was out there for PDF's.
Thanks!
-
Thank you Keri for the helpful resource. I actually ended up doing all of those things for our client. Also, I found out that the default Drupal 6 robot.txt file, does not allow the search engines to index pdf's, images, and flash. Therefore, one must eliminate the disallow: /sites/ from the Robot.txt file.
-
This doesn't address ranking, but the YOUmoz post does talk about best practices for optimizing PDF content and may help you. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search
-
To be honest Dana, outside of the basics mentioned, I tended not to go overboard and many of them started to rank naturally as Google spidered the site. Just remember to give the link to the PDF a strong anchor text and if possible, add a little content around it to explain what visitors can expect in the document. Also remember to add a link to Adobe so that they can download the free reader if they dont have it already.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Andy
-
Thank you iNet SEO, Excellent resource...
I was also wondering if anyone had any posts / experience with understanding the indexing and ranking of PDF content?
-
Yes, you can optomise PDF's - have a read of this as it seems to cover most points
http://www.seoconsultants.com/pdf/seo
Sorry, I forgot to add that PDF's are useful for those who are wishing to download something to read at a later stage or whilst offline. Don't rush to advise them that HTML is the way to go unless it actually is. I have printed off many a PDF and taken it into meetings with me.
Regards,
Andy
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
-
Best way to deal with 100 product pages
It feels good to be BACK. I miss Moz. I left for a long time but happy to be back! 🙂 My client is a local HVAC company. They sell Lennox system. Lennox provides a tool that we hooked up to that allows visitors to their site to 'see' 120+ different kind of air quality, furnace and AC units. They problem is (I think its a problem) is Google and other crawl tools are seeing these 100+ pages that are not unique, helpful or related to my client. There is a little bit of cookie cutter text and images and specs and that's it. Are these pages potentially hurting my client? I can't imagine they are helping. Best way to deal with these? Thank you! Thank you! Matthew
Technical SEO | | Localseo41440 -
How to deal with duplicate pages on Shopify
Moz is alerting me that there's about 60 duplicate pages on my Shopify ecommerce site. Most of them are products. I'm not sure how to fix this since the coding for my site is in liquid. I'm not sure if this is something I even need to be worried about. Most of these duplicate pages are a result of product tags shopify sites use to group products you tag with characteristics that the user can select in the product view. here are a couple URLS: https://www.mamadoux.com/collections/all/hooded https://www.mamadoux.com/collections/all/jumpers https://www.mamadoux.com/collections/all/menswear
Technical SEO | | Mamadoux0 -
What is the best way to deal with an event calendar
I have an event calendar that has multiple repeating items into the future. They are classes that typically all have the same titles but will occasionally have different information. I don't know what is the best way to deal with them and am open to suggestions. Currently Moz anayltics is showing multiple errors (duplicate page titles, descriptions and overly dynamic urls). I'm assuming that it's showing duplicate elements way into the future. I thought of having the calendar no followed at all but the content for the classes seems valuable. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | categorycode0 -
Best way to deal with these urls?
Found overly dynamic urls in the crawl report. http://www.trespass.co.uk/camping/festivals-friendly/clothing?Product_sort=PriceDesc&utm_campaign=banner&utm_medium=blog&utm_source=Roslyn Best way to deal with these? Cheers Guys
Technical SEO | | Trespass0 -
Dealing with duplicate content
Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites. What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms. Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Timmmmy0 -
Ensuring Assets (PDFs, PowerPoint Files, Word Docs, etc.) are Indexable on Site
Hi there - I'm working on an educational site in which users will be able to search our repository of PDF articles, PowerPoint files, and so on through an on-site search engine. What is the best way to ensure each of these documents/assets are indexable by Google since they technically don't reside on an HTML page....they are just pulled up if the user searches for them? The site itself is just a few pages, but the files, articles, and videos in the repository are in the hundreds. Should I just name and tag them properly and make sure they're all included in an XML site map? Anything else suggested? Thanks very much!
Technical SEO | | MedThinkCommunications0 -
Dealing with 404 pages
I built a blog on my root domain while I worked on another part of the site at .....co.uk/alpha I was really careful not to have any links go to alpha - but it seems google found and indexed it. The problem is that part of alpha was a copy of the blog - so now soon we have a lot of duplicate content. The /alpha part is now ready to be taken over to the root domain, the initial plan was to then delete /alpha. But now that its indexed I'm worried that Ill have all these 404 pages. I'm not sure what to do.. I know I can just do a 301 redirect for all those pages to go to the other ones in case a link comes on but I need to delete those pages as the server is already very slow. Or does a 301 redirect mean that I don't need those pages anymore? Will those pages still get indexed by google as separate pages? Please assist.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0 -
What's the best way to deal with an entire existing site moving from http to https?
I have a client that just switched their entire site from the standard unsecure (http) to secure (https) because of over-zealous compliance issues for protecting personal information in the health care realm. They currently have the server setup to 302 redirect from the http version of a URL to the https version. My first inclination was to have them simply update that to a 301 and be done with it, but I'd prefer not to have to 301 every URL on the site. I know that putting a rel="canonical" tag on every page that refers to the http version of the URL is a best practice (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394), but should I leave the 302 redirects or update them to 301's. Something seems off to me about the search engines visiting an http page, getting 301 redirected to an https page and then being told by the canonical tag that it's actually the URL they were just 301 redirected from.
Technical SEO | | JasonCooper0