Hi, I’m Bruce Clay, and this is the Ask Us Anything series. The University I work for is launching a new website that features numerous different research articles. As the SEO analyst, I will try to rank for terms that I believe our target market is searching for. My only concern is that since our site is primarily research articles, most of our content is formatted as PDFs. Does having numerous PDF files on the site pose any serious SEO issues or does Google index PDF files just like any other web page? My experience is that PDFs, while they may not perform as well as a web page, are certainly indexed like a web page. When you look at a PDF in the Google search results and then view cache, it’s going to actually be represented as HTML; The underlying structure of a PDF.
So, yes, it could rank perhaps as well as any other web page. What I also find is that it varies topic by topic. I’ve done some queries where the top five results are all PDFs. In other areas, I don’t find a PDF. PDFs are usually more like white papers, they’re very theme oriented, they’re very much like a thesis and those keep you from actually performing as well because you’re not going to have featured snippets, you’re not going to have the ability to dynamically alter your main title or description or even control some of your content as well as you would on a web page. But will it rank? Absolutely. The big difference is that the PDF might actually be best represented as a webpage and then that webpage would link to the PDF for people to download in print in which case the PDF would be in a directory that is blocked by robots.txt and then your web page could actually rank. That would be the best way to do it, it works out best, it’s spidered easily, you’re not going to have to worry about anybody parsing it out or where about the content format, it is going to be better represented on a mobile device, all of that makes sense.
I would definitely make it a web page that links to the PDF, but yes, PDFs will be indexed, you’ll just not have as many top-ranked pages as if it were a webpage. It varies topic by topic, but PDFs tend to rank as well as regular pages There is limited function with PDFs so it is always better to have an editable web page instead The best approach is to optimize for a web page that links to the PDF.
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