Embedding PDF previews and maintaining crawlability/link-equity.

[DougRoberts]

One site that I'm working on has previously had a great deal of success from the pdf preview content on the site. The pdf previews are quite substantial and rank for many many long-tail terms that drive a reasonable amount of traffic back to the site to purchase the full version of the product.

As part of a site redesign, the way the pdf previews are embedded/presented on the page is changing slightly:

The proposed modal pop-up on the new site the code looks like thie:

<object data="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf" style="width:100%; min-height:600px; max-height:100%;max-height:100%;"><embed src="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf"></object>

Where as the old code looked like this:

<object data="mt-pdf-previewpreview.pdf#view=FitH,50&scrollbar=1&toolbar=0&statusbar=0&messages=0&navpanes=0" <br="">type='application/pdf'
width='100%'
height='600'>

It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files.

No worries, you can download the PDF file here.</object>

Note: how previously the code contained a plain, standard link to the pdf document.

My worry is that without this link, search engines won't a) be able to discover/crawl the pdf content or b) pass any link-equity to these pdfs.

Does anyone have any experience/recommendations about this? I'd like to have some information before I request that they add a plain link to the pdf previews back onto the on-page content.

[The_Sage]

Search engines will still be able to crawl the PDF. They crawl images, don't they?

[KaneJamison]

I haven't seen any studies with <embed> the way I have with <iframe>. <embed> is also used for video and flash, but neither would be indexed the same way as PDF so hard to compare. The embed tag is pretty standardized, so I really doubt they wouldn't crawl this similarly.</p> <p>IIRC in the ugly era of flash, it was proper to have a <noscript> {crawlable content here} </noscript> section after the <embed>, so that's one comparable situation, but that's due to the flash itself not being crawled well.</p> <p>If it's not a hassle, I would add the text link to the PDF that says "download full PDF" or similar. If it is a hassle and takes longer than a couple hours, then it's a harder call.</p> <p>Similar thread that could be helpful:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3686331/does-google-index-html-content-supplied-by-the-object-tag">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3686331/does-google-index-html-content-supplied-by-the-object-tag</a></li> </ul></iframe>

[DougRoberts]

Thanks Kane - I've managed to make the case for a real-simple "download preview pdf" link so at least I feel comfortable that they won't lose too much of this "hidden" traffic.

It would still be nice to understand how <embed> is handled and whether any link-equity passes though the embed. Tight deadlines on projects don't mean you have time to experiment.

[KaneJamison]

That's the route I'd push for as well I think.

Agreed on experimentation. Please report back if you get a chance to test this. Perhaps choose a small number of PDFs on this site redesign and leave the link off of them?