Client wants to repackage in-depth content as PowerPoint files and embed on site. SEO implications?

[CR-SEO]

Hi, I've a client who is planning to build out "courses" for their site. Their ultimate goal is to have videos (which will have transcriptions) but since the videos are not yet ready they want to launch with the content in PowerPoint format instead. Thing is, the pages they have now are really good content/in-depth. In short it seems videos are Phase 2, so their Phase 1 preference is to take all their courses content and put them in PowerPoint slides and add them to their web site.

While I understand standalone files like PDFs and PPTs can be indexable, my recollection is that embedded slides are not (like SlideShare). Is that correct?

My worry is that by taking this content and reformatting it into PowerPoints will hurt their site instead of helping.

Any insight is appreciated!

[martinxm]

Hi CR-SEO

PPT submission in SEO is good to get referral traffic to website. It is an effective online marketing tactic to attract targeted traffic, get quality inbound links and maximize your site's visibility in major search engines. It helps to aware business services.

Powerpoint Sharing Sites are:

• www.issuu.com
• SlideShare.net
• Scribd

They are high authority sites the presentations tend to rank very well for the targeted keywords as well.

[brettmandoes]

Hi there, I think your specific question is, will embedding power points into the website hurt their site or help it? I'm going to try to break this down for you.

If the slides are indexable one of two things will happen:1. Rankings go up for new, related terms that you either weren't ranking for before or were ranking poorly for
2. The powerpoint cannibalizes rankings for the other pages that were previously built out

I'm going to assume you know how to track for this since it's pretty straightforward.

If the slides are not indexable then there should be no reason it would negatively impact rankings. It's essentially invisible to Google.

SlideShare slides can be crawled and indexed. I would expect that to be the default behavior unless you find documentation that shows otherwise. If you don't want it indexed, embed on a page and mark that page noindex.

Let me know if that helps!

[CR-SEO]

Hi Brett,

Yes that is my question, thank you! First, I appreciate your response!

Second, I had not found anything related to SlideShare slides being crawlable by engines. Do you happen to have a source/link that they are? I understand the ability to no-index the page an embedded SlideShare is on, but if the client wants only a single SlideShare embedded on a page, my guess/assumption is that the page could be viewed as having thin content. My suggestion to them was to have supporting copy/content related to the SlideShare added to the page so it was better optimized.

Thoughts?