Whilst sifting through the masses of content on the internet, you are bound to find that many content pieces, such as catalogues, press clippings and manuals, are made available in PDF format rather than HTML.

If you started the development of your website without having kept SEO in mind, the chances are that you uploaded content as PDF’s, and have since then been either unable or unwilling to translate those into HTML. Especially in the case of product catalogues and online flyers, PDF is often the go-to format because it’s such an easy file structure to work with, and because it is very simple to save documents in that format and upload them onto the internet.

While it is however not a great idea to saturate your web presence with PDF documents, the upside of the situation is that you can use them sparingly and still manage positive SEO returns. Google has very much upped their game in terms of extracting meaning from PDF’s and indexing the relevant information, much as they would with an HTML page.

You simply need to keep the following in mind:

1.)     Duplicate Content Rules are the same irrespective of format

The rules which relate to the presence of duplicate content still apply to PDF files. It is thus important to make conscientious decisions about your content, the format, and then stick to the plan. Will it be presented as a PDF file, or as HTML?

Avoid the temptation of increasing your websites page count by creating an HTML version of every PDF. They won’t be indexed. The PDF format works best when employed in design-based documents that would possibly lose their effect when translated into HTML, so there shouldn’t be a need to have a duplicate version. Should you wish to make available a HTML version of a PDF documents for the purposes of usability, then that is perfectly fine. Just be sure to clearly indicate which version you want to be indexed for search engine purposes. This can be facilitated at sitemap and document level.

 

2.)    Titles remain the most important consideration

People who are well-versed in the SEO game will tell you that titles are without a doubt one of the most important things to keep in mind. This fact remains applicable for PDF’s that are on your domain. The advice from Google is that it pulls information from two separate sources when the title of a PDF is being determined. The first being the title attribute, which is within the metadata of the file, and the second being the anchor text of any of the links pointing to the PDF page.

 

Although you can’t control the inbound links, you are able to specify a title which is optimized, descriptive and unique when you’re first creating the PDF. This needs to be followed up with a considered approach to inter-site links. Even if the PDF is only linked from the sitemap, make sure to make use of relevant, keyword-rich anchor text, and be sure to apply the same link rules as you would when creating any other potential internal links.

 

3.)    Links can still pass PageRank

It is likely that you will be aware of the fact that it is possible to include links in PDF files, but did you know that it isn’t possible to specify a link as nofollow? This quirk is something to keep in mind as any link you include in a PDF page will be capable of passing on PageRank.

 

While you may not mind sharing PageRank out amongst your own pages, this could be a problem if you refer to some external sources or third party sites. Publishing a white paper in PDF and having links in the reading list of bibliography is one instance when this would be a problem. A second may be having a review of a product and then a link to the original publisher of the review – while both instances will add credibility to your work, they also mean passing on PageRank.

 

Keep the above tips in mind when using PDFs on your site and you’ll be well on the way to making the most of their presence.

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