authorship can be identified and inferred by Google for PDFs<\/a>. However, as with HTML pages, authorship will only show for the first author listed, so it’s important to be sure that the preferred author is listed first. Also, the PDF must be an identified “contributor” site in Google+ for that author.<\/p>\nThe Cons Of Using PDFs<\/h2>\n
There are a number of drawbacks to using PDFs when it comes to navigation and lack of control regarding document length, page content, document organization, code editing, structured markup and tracking.<\/p>\n
1. Lack of Navigation<\/strong><\/p>\nOne of my greatest concerns about relying too heavily on PDFs for website content is that PDFs often lack site navigation. This means that when a site visitor arrives at the website, they have no simple way to reach other pages on the site. So if the PDF happens to rank well in organic search and a searcher finds the link and arrives at the PDF, how can that visitor easily access other content on your site?<\/p>\n
2. Length of Document<\/strong><\/p>\nBecause it’s so easy to save a document as a PDF file, it’s not common to break up a PDF into multiple, smaller documents. For example, in the case of a whitepaper or report, the PDF could range from a few pages to hundreds of pages. This isn’t really ideal for SEO in some cases because longer documents contain more text and often multiple topics. This means that one PDF document, which will equate to one URL, may contain a lot of content that normally might be broken up into multiple website pages in HTML.<\/p>\n
3. Lack of Page Organization\/Control<\/strong><\/p>\nCertainly one of the greatest benefits of using a content management system for a website is page organization and control. PDFs, however, don’t often work within the organizational structures of CMS as pages but rather as downloads. So, relying on PDFs as page content isn’t ideal simply from a page organization and control perspective.<\/p>\n
4. Lack of Code Editing Capabilities<\/strong><\/p>\nCertainly one of the benefits of HTML pages is the flexibility that HTML authors have to edit the website code. For instance, images can be optimized for search through tags and other options in HTML, but images cannot be optimized as well in a PDF. This also makes PDFs less than ideal for 508 compliance as well because you cannot add an “alt” tag to each image within the PDF.<\/p>\n
5. Can’t Implement Structured Markup<\/strong><\/p>\nStructured markup and the rich snippets they can generate have been shown through various studies to improve SERP visibility and click-through rate in organic search. But PDFs don’t work the same way that HTML does — authors cannot apply structured markup to the content because of the way the PDF file type works.<\/p>\n
In my estimation, that’s a true disadvantage of PDFs. For instance, what if your PDF contains recipes? You won’t be able to use structured markup around those recipes, therefore excluding those recipes from Google’s recipe view in organic search and preventing those recipes from showing recipe rich snippets.<\/p>\n
6. Lack of Tracking Mechanisms<\/strong><\/p>\nI find the greatest disadvantage of using PDFs to be the lack of tracking mechanisms I can apply to PDF documents. Google Analytics can perform tracking through onclick event tracking for PDF downloads, but other tracking within the PDF is not as simple. Additionally, there may be other tracking mechanisms your site uses, such as a marketing automation system. The tracking code for these systems also would not be able to be added to the PDF.<\/p>\n
Unlike with HTML pages, PDFs make it much more difficult to fully understand how a visitor is progressing through your site, which is less than ideal.<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
In the end, PDFs are clearly not the best option for SEO. This doesn’t mean they are bad<\/em> for SEO, but they simply don’t put the control for SEO in the hands of the webmaster per se. To realize the greatest benefits from SEO, where applicable, I do recommend moving content from PDF to HTML site pages, giving webmasters greater control, flexibility and the best opportunity at SEO and visibility and tracking advantages.<\/p>\n
\nContributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff<\/a> and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.<\/em><\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n