Are PDFs searchable?

[PetsBestInsurance]

This post is deleted!

[EGOL]

PDF documents are crawled, cached and indexed by Google.  They can be optimized and will rank well in the SERPs.  Text in those documents can be found by searching.

Does Google consider them in their search for duplicate content?  Probably.... because .pdf documents can be find in a search for duplicate content in quotes when you encounter this....

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 42 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

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More about pdf documents in google here...

http://www.seomoz.org/q/will-a-pdf-pass-pagerank

[AlanBleiweiss]

EGOL hit it - but I'd just add NOT ALL PDFs are.  All too often I see client sites loaded with PDF documents that are nothing more than scanned images of print pages.

[EGOL]

Thank you, Alan.  Thumbs up!

The text in those image-laden files is not searchable.   If the creator completed the properties form there could be a few useful words there - but if they are using images they probably have no clue about "properties".

[KeriMorgret]

Actually, careful on that one Alan and EGOL. I have seen Google index the text from PDFs that are scanned as images. The company we bought, called Swampworks, was often mentioned in a newsletter that was typed and distributed by mail in the 80s and 90s. Someone scanned them and put them online, and they will show in the SERPs despite being entirely images. You can "view as html" and see the OCR that Google came up with. Some of it works, some of it doesn't.

http://www.google.com/search?q=swampworks+inurl%3Ahullbusters

[edited to add the following]

This has been happening for a couple of years now apparently. I see where Jen Lopez covered a similar example that Bruce Clay discussed at  the November 2009 pubcon at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/favorite-tidbits-from-pubcon-2009.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Thanks for this info Keri.  Shows how far Google is willing to go, yet also that it's another imperfect process...

[EGOL]

Thanks for this info.  I did an experiment on an image in google books and  you are right!

[PetsBestInsurance]

This post is deleted!

[EGOL]

Here is an example of the words "Wrigley Swim" being picked up from an scanned image .pdf document from Google Books.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Yeah I knew they were doing it with books, just wasn't aware about PDFs in general til Keri pointed it out.