PDFs can present problems for a website. On the one hand, they present issues for search engine optimisation. On the other, they can be valuable assets to offer your site users. The SEO stand on PDFs has never been clear, and this doesn’t help site owners decide whether to include them on their pages or not. To help you to decide, let’s look at some of the issues:
1. PDFs aren’t crawled like web pages. This means that a PDF addition to your search engine optimisation blog may not count as much as a new post. While Google is hesitant to make any announcements about the crawlability of PDFs, Matt Cutts has dropped the hint that PDFs are a bit like Flash. This is an indication that the search engines can’t process the information within these files as easily as HTML content.
Can this be resolved? It can, to a certain extent. If you ensure that the web page featuring the PDF has all of the essential information on it, your PDF’s content isn’t as important. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about format issues in organic SEO.
2. PDFs turn user attention away. By clicking on a PDF, site users look away from your pages. There is always a risk that they may not come back.
Can this be resolved? This issue is easily resolved with downloadable PDFs, rather than having the files automatically open.
In summary, PDFs may not be a mainstream SEO asset, but they are certainly a site asset. Don’t rule them out completely.
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Posted by Rory.
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