GENERAL SEO How To Optimize

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PDFs For SEO, But You Should Make Pages Instead By Patrick Stox ✓ Reviewed by Joshua Hardwick Updated: August 22, 2023 7 min read Patrick Stox Patrick Stox Patrick Stox is a Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. He was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and a reviewer for the 2022 SEO chapter. He also co-wrote the SEO Book For Beginners by Ahrefs and was the Technical Review Editor for The Art of SEO 4th Edition. He’s an organizer for several groups including the Raleigh SEO Meetup (the most successful SEO Meetup in the US), the Beer and SEO Meetup, the Raleigh SEO Conference, runs a Technical SEO Slack group, and is a moderator for /r/TechSEO on Reddit. Get the week's best marketing content Email Subscription.


Enter your email Subscribe Contents How Google treats PDFs Why PDFs aren't great for SEO Special Data How to optimize a PDF How to track PDF views Google first started indexing PDFs in 2001. The format is commonly used in government, academia, and business environments. PDFs are great for compatibility and consistency. They work on nearly any device and always maintain the same visual look. However, if you’re creating new content for the web, you should consider using web pages over PDFs. If you still want to optimize your PDFs, I’ll show you how, but I don’t recommend it. Let’s explore: How Google treats PDFs Why PDFs aren’t great for SEO How to optimize PDFs How to track PDF views How Google treats PDFs PDFs show in Google search results with a PDF tag. 1 google search pdf PDFs are converted to and indexed as HTML.




For PDFs where there are images of text, Google uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to convert the image of text into text. Images in PDFs are also indexed in image search results. Google chooses pages over PDFs if they’re duplicate. If you have pages and PDFs with the same content, Google tends to prefer the page version of the content as the lead version of the duplicate cluster. This means that signals will be consolidated to the page version and that will be the version that shows in search results. I’m not sure if Google will index PDFs when embedded in another page. Many people want to do this in order to track clicks on the PDFs.