Do Digital Magazines Yudu/Issuu Pass Domain Authority to PDF Backlinks

[JoyAumann]

If you upload a pdf with links to your website threaded throughout to a digital magazine with high DA like Yudu/Issuu, are those links follow or nofollow?

[martinxm]

Hi Joy.

Back in 2011, Google said: “We first started indexing PDF files in 2001 and currently has hundreds of millions of PDF files indexed.” They even come with their own tag in SERPs to alert users that the result is PDF-based.

PDFs are also used to house a specific type of content and, as such, attempts to optimize these documents must bear that in mind. Follow this 8 tips below and you should have a much better chance of gaining SEO traffic from PDFs (I do that):

1. Choose the File Name Carefully
2. Link to the Document Internally
3. Link Out to Relevant Content
4. Add a Unique and Optimized Title
5. Create content for the Mobile PDF Experience
6. Compress Images if is Possible
7. Use Subheadings
8. Use Plain Text

[JoyAumann]

I'm aware that google indexes pdf files, I'm asking specifically if the domain authority of specific digital magazines passes DA to the links.

[martinxm]

Ok sorry. So, John Mueller says that "Google will read links in any file (pdf,xls,doc,etc), but will not follow them with link juice.Only proper HTML anchor tagged links in files will pass link juice**.**“

From this I conclude that PDF links are better compared with URLs found in Flash files or JavaScript. As with rel=”nofollow” links and written URL references, Google will use PDF links for document discovery, but they won’t be treated the same way as web native, HTML links.

But you need to "hack" your PDFs

I found this information here https://dejanseo.com.au/pdf-hack/ where you can "hack" your PDF to get link juice to your web.

If your digitalmagazine is not hacked, I think it will not work.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Hi! I wrote that article.

I asked Gary Ilyes about this in a middle of my talk at Big Digital in Adelaide last year as he was in the audience. He said yes, PDF links do pass PageRank. That said, I still use header canonicalisation to consolidate PDF into HTML files. Just to be sure.