GWT shows 38 external links from 8 domains to this PDF - But it shows no links and no authority in OSE

[danatanseo]

Hi All,

I found one other discussion about the subject of PDFs and passing of PageRank here: http://moz.com/community/q/will-a-pdf-pass-pagerank  But this thread didn't answer my question so am posting it here.

This PDF: http://www.ccisolutions.com/jsp/pdf/YAM-EMX_SERIES.PDF is reported by GWT to have 38 links coming from 8 unique domains. I checked the domains and some of them are high-quality relevant sites. Here's the list:

Domains and Number of Links
prodiscjockeyequipment.com 9
decaturilmetalbuildings.com 9
timberlinesteelbuildings.com 6
jaymixer.com 4
panelsteelbuilding.com 4
steelbuildingsguide.net 3
freedocumentsearch.com 2
freedocument.net 1

However, when I plug the URL for this PDF into OSE, it reports no links and a Page Authority if only "1". This is not a new page. This is a really old page.

In addition to that, when I check the PageRank of this URL, the PageRank is "nil" - not even "0" -  I'm currently working on adding links back to our main site from within our PDFs, but I'm not sure how worthwhile this is if the PDFs aren't being allocated any authority from the pages already linking to them. Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Thanks all!

[Travis_Bailey]

That's interesting, but how are the buildings sites relevant? None of them seem to get much traffic over the last couple of years either. The free docs sites appear to have an appreciable amount of estimated traffic, but what of the next Panda update?

Now, for the thought. I checked Sony.com for PDF files via operator. The tenth result was this. It had a Moz PA of 35. The rest were 1s. I couldn't get any backlink information from Majestic or Ahrefs. So, it appears all of our tools are dreadfully broken in this scenario. The best thing to do is more testing.

[danatanseo]

Very interesting Travis. I hadn't even thought to take a look at some competitor's pdfs to see what they are looking like in some of the same tools. Yes, this is something we need to keep testing to see if we can figure out if going through the trouble of inserting links back to our domain is a worthwhile project.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Dana,

I'm inclined to think that this is a problem with how the tools process links to and from PDFs rather than the passing of PageRank through PDFs itself as well, although I am not sure. I would certainly not say no to a link to or from a great PDF if that was the only option, although I have also actively encouraged clients to re-publish their quality content housed in PDF format as HTML and redirect the PDF file to the new source. We're just a lot more sure about how authority passes through HTML files.