So hot on the heels of my SEO Flash experiments I'm halfway through another series of tests looking at PDFs and if their links carry any weight but rather then discussing it here lets move this post over to well a PDF so without further ado
SEO PDF ideas (warning it's a pdf)
So what do we think will a PDF link pass any mustard? The plan is to use this and a series of test sites to see if PDFs will pass weight and what if any factors effect PD rankings.
Sounds very interesting my friend! cannot wait for the outcome.
I have always wondered about this. I always “optimize” my pdf’s but never really considered them to be of any real relevance. I am curious to know how it comes out.
I myself used to block, using robots.txt, from the documents folder of my sites but found that a couple pdf’s actually showed up so I opened it up to the robots. I doubt PDF’s are really converters but who knows this might cause a new wave in conversions. I know how thoose “pesky SEO’s” can market anything.
i guess the consensus would be that if you make good, we’ll all join in.
Who are you calling a white elephant?
I am seeing the PDF from my site is in rankings with some of our client’s keywords, actually that’s because the PDF holds only the keywords and rankings. but yeah! i am looking forward to it now (PDF optimization).
I have been having my own little experiment of my own. I have reproduced some of my top articles and posted them on my homepage for people to view and save if they wish.
So therefore, for example, I have an article on Computer Terms and their meanings on my website. Then I made it into a pdf.
Anyway I was shocked to see the pdf versions, which are recent editions to my site, come up in the search engines…ABOVE THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE… It depends on what you search for however I am getting traffic from these pdf’s…
I don’t know if the links are any good but they are getting people to my site!!
Well so far it has not gone quite according to plan, less then half of the test PDFs have been indexed. So if nothing else so far we can say using PDFs is not the quick way to get those rankings.
@Chris - Them pesky SEO will optimise anything but in this case much like Flash its how Google interprets the extrapolated data that will make a huge difference.
@Gab - Would it be better if the elephants were pink and fluffy?
@Amit - Hopefully you are only seeing those on long tails or you have a problem with your clients set-up PDFs certainly shouldn’t be ranking higher then HTML for the same term on the same domain.
@Can’t be bothered to read the simple rules
- It’s good you are getting people to your site regardless of how. In a straight fight the HTML should always win so I’m guess that their are significantly more external links to your PDF then your HTML version. However if that’s not the case you might want to look for duplicate content issues or another reason the HTML version of the page is not ranking.
To all look out for the follow up article late this week/early next week hopefully the stragglers will get their butts indexed.
Let me know the results, I have a client with loads of pdf’s
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