Is a PDF file considered content that the search robots can detect? If they could it would mean a lot of extra phrases and long tail keywords that would otherwise not be included. I guess if PDF's are not recognized like this it would be beneficial to add the copy directly into a web page.

PDFs are spidered by most search engines, and do come up in searches. However, keep in mind that many people do not like to wait for them to open.

But, they will come up, and links within them to count towards your PR.

Thanks for that, I did hear somewhere that if a human can click on it a robot can. Good to know.

Is a PDF file considered content that the search robots can detect? If they could it would mean a lot of extra phrases and long tail keywords that would otherwise not be included. I guess if PDF's are not recognized like this it would be beneficial to add the copy directly into a web page.

Yes it's content but one word of caution, don't use Photoshop to create pdfs! If you are using Photoshop it may be making an image of text (think photo of text) and not "real" text that search engines can find.

That's good advice. I use Word or Adobe Acrobat to create the PDF's.

Use Word (or Wordperfect) not Acrobat.

For reasons that I can only describe as being stupid to the extreme, only the very latest (and really expensive) version of Acrobat saves links within the PDF document. And not if you use the printer driver function.

If you have no links in your document, it gets considered to be a dead end or honeypot by the search engines. Not good.

As beu alluded to, if you take an image or scan and make it a PDF, then it's a PDF of an image or scan, so it's not spiderable except as a file name (like an image).

There is another twist. If you make a document with links in it, then turn that document into a PDF using the PRINTER function (which is usually how Acrobat and other related PDF makers do things) then all the links are lost. They are lost as soon as the file prepared to be sent to the printer device.

Oh, they will show up in the *viewer* as a clickable link if the whole link exists (but not if it has anchor text), but this is the viewer turning it into the link, not an actual link in the document that a spider could follow.

The only way to create a PDF that is indexable as text and has real links with anchor text (in short, the only SEO-friendly method) is to use a method where the links are processed within the document. This is usually the case where, for example, you create the PDF using the "Save as" feature rather than the "Print to" feature.

This is built into the latest version of Word (if you download the free plugin) and in the WordPerfect Suite. There are a couple of other options, as well.But most are not SEO-friendly.

PDF from image = bad
PDF from printer driver = bad
PDF processed within the text editor and saved = good.

Ian

Wow, that's a lot of great information. I'll keep that in ind when creating my next PDF for web incusion.
Thanks.

PDF from image = bad
PDF from printer driver = bad
PDF processed within the text editor and saved = good.

Ian

Great points mcanerin, thanks for the information!;)

Why not create a page that contains the same content as your pdf-file ? Easier for people that do not want to download the pdf and it certainly will rank higher than the pdf. You can still offer your visitors a link to download the pdf and print it.
But use rel="nofollow" in the link to the pdf-file in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

Thanks mcanerin for the great information, never thought about it that way...