Dealing with PDFs?

[tqinet]

Hello fellow mozzers!

One of our clients does an excellent job of providing excellent content, and we don't even have to nag them about it (imagine that!). This content is usually centered around industry reports, financial analyses, and economic forcasts; however, they always post them in the form of pdfs.

How does Google view PDF's, and is there a way to optimize them? Ideally, I am going to try to get this client set up with a blog-like plateform that will use HTML text, rather than PDF's, but I wanted to see what info was out there for PDF's.

Thanks!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Yes, you can optomise PDF's - have a read of this as it seems to cover most points

http://www.seoconsultants.com/pdf/seo

Sorry, I forgot to add that PDF's are useful for those who are wishing to download something to read at a later stage or whilst offline. Don't rush to advise them that HTML is the way to go unless it actually is. I have printed off many a PDF and taken it into meetings with me.

Regards,

Andy

[tqinet]

Thank you iNet SEO, Excellent resource...

I was also wondering if anyone had any posts / experience with understanding the indexing and ranking of PDF content?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

To be honest Dana, outside of the basics mentioned, I tended not to go overboard and many of them started to rank naturally as Google spidered the site. Just remember to give the link to the PDF a strong anchor text and if possible, add a little content around it to explain what visitors can expect in the document. Also remember to add a link to Adobe so that they can download the free reader if they dont have it already.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Andy

[KeriMorgret]

This doesn't address ranking, but the YOUmoz post does talk about best practices for optimizing PDF content and may help you. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search

[tqinet]

Thank you Keri for the helpful resource. I actually ended up doing all of those things for our client. Also, I found out that the default Drupal 6 robot.txt file, does not allow the search engines to index pdf's, images, and flash. Therefore, one must eliminate the disallow: /sites/ from the Robot.txt file.