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.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Below, we’ll 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.
Why PDFs aren’t great for SEO
Even though Google indexes and occasionally ranks PDFs, the format has a few disadvantages over web pages:
Not mobile-friendly. PDFs are made to have a consistent appearance across devices. That means there is no such thing as a mobile-friendly PDF.
Lack of navigation. Most PDFs do not include navigational elements, making it more difficult for people to explore other content.
Lack of some SEO attributes. PDF files have equivalent versions of many SEO elements, but there are also many elements missing like individual link attributes like nofollow, UGC, and sponsored.