Can PDFs on your website be picked up in search engines?

[JennH]

Can PDFs on your website be picked up in search engines? There's a ton of info online that says it can and can't be picked up.

[StreamlineMetrics]

Short answer, yes. Search engines are still not as good at crawling and indexing them as well as they are with HTML pages, but they have definitely made strides in recent years. Do a Google search for "filetype:pdf" and you will see all of the PDFs that are indexed in Google.

That being said, they are still not ideal for SEO so I recommend not using them whenever possible. I wrote a couple of blog posts about this issue - http://streamlinemetrics.com/blog/seo-for-pdfs-optimizing-pdf-files-for-search-engines.php and http://streamlinemetrics.com/blog/how-to-redirect-pdf-files-with-php-asp-or-htaccess-for-seo-seo-for-pdfs-part-2.php.

[josh-riley]

Agreed! I had an issue with many PDFs ranking. I've done what I can to clean things up so better pages rank instead (my goal is to sell; I'd rather someone end up on my page that has an "add to cart" button AND a link to the catalog/PDF info).

Anyone who says it can't happen - well, it did to me.