SEO and Indexing via a Document Reader

[JoeyGedgaud]

My questions are in regards to Google being able to index PDF's and Images that are viewed from a document reader. The website offers visitors that login to view a variety of documents including PDFs and images. Will Google be able to find and index these documents so they can show up in search results?

Will the PDFs show up in search results and will the images show up in search results?

Will Google be able to find and index these documents so they can show up in search results?

Will the PDFs show up in search results and will the images show up in search results?

Will the PDFs show up in search results and will the images show up in search results?

How does the document reader affect the SEO of the website?

How does the login affect the SEO of the website?

Thank you,

Joey

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Joey!

I would just run a crawler like Screaming Frog - and if your PDFs and Images show up in the crawl report, then Google will be able to find them and index them. Since they are behind a login, that's the only reason they might get blocked. Also, you could try to submit them to Google with the "Fetch and render" in Search Console and "submit to index".

[JoeyGedgaud]

Is it possible to let Google index the content that is behind a login?

Joey

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Joey

They would just need to be able to crawl and access it somehow. So you'd want to link to that content from public pages, or maybe try putting it in an XML or HTML sitemap, and as mentioned try "submitting to index" in Search Console. But yes, they'll index it as long as they can crawl it from somewhere else. Running the crawler on your site and seeing if it gets picked up is a good way to see.