Can PDF Links Improve SEO?

antp__

Free Member
Mar 31, 2014
176
25
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I'd say they can be solely because certain search terms show pdf's in the results. You could give this a read: http://searchengineland.com/are-pdfs-optimal-for-seo-182076.

Whether they will help, it depends how you're going to be using them to be honest. If I had two options: 1) to create nice looking content pages using a bit of styling or 2) upload a pdf in the body, I know which one i'd prefer to go with.

You could have a landing page on how ladies can lose their baby weight with a downloadable diet plan and exercise guide for example. Both of which could in theory be indexed in Google search results.

So as I say, it depends how you wish to use PDFs really.
 
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J

Jose Barreiro

Hi,
Yes, PDFs are advantageous in SEO becasue whenver you add the link of related PDF to your blog post or vice-versa it help in garbing traffic.

For Example: Suppose if you have published an article in high domain authority website and added the link of your pdf in the article and you have added the link of you website or blog post in that pdf you can actually get the some of link juice of the high domain authority.

So try to use the pdf as it can help in increase in traffic, improve ranking and provide you new set of readers too.
 
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mindhunter

Free Member
Apr 2, 2012
29
1
India
I am wondering whether PDF's can be read / crawled (or whatever the term is!) by search engines? If so would this be advantageous for SEO?

Hey !!!!!!!! PDF submission is one of the most focus and result oriented part of SEO, and it is very much true that like any other content based format it is also crawled by the Search Engines and delivers great and immediate results. They are just like word file with proper keyword positioning, density, H1, H2 Tags, and give information about the related services/product of your website and is optimised as HTML pages also.
So yeah, PDF submission is an essential part of SEO and offers great traffic and backlinks, while sharing and posting it on different Social Networking sites and PDF submission sites respectively. And about the results statics, they are crawled and show in SERPs like other word submissions/HTML pages and it worth more than its name. Go try them it will give better results and also increases the traffic volume. But while submitting keep the content more relevantand original.
 
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veronika smith

Free Member
Apr 30, 2016
4
0
Derby
I am wondering whether PDF's can be read / crawled (or whatever the term is!) by search engines? If so would this be advantageous for SEO?
yeah it is crawled by search engines and also shows in the webmaster tools that you got the backlink from that pdf submission sites. It has advantage as your pdf contents are relative and have good information so that reader download it and helps to drive traffic as user visit your site.
 
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Bart Simpson

Free Member
Jan 12, 2010
183
29
www.eukhost.com
Yes, PDFs help in SEO.
Some advantages of using PDF's
1. PDFs can be easily created. For those who don't know HTML programming, PDFs can be a substitute to rapidly publish web based content.
2. PDFs contain meta keywords and meta description.
3. PDFs contain links which is crawled by search engine bots
4. The content in the PDFs are readable and indexable by search engines.

However, it does have some disadvantages as well
1. For website content, PDFs lack content navigation
2. PDFs are lengthy and usually we do not break it into smaller documents. As longer documents contain more text it is not suitable for SEO.
3. PDFs lack page organisation and control which is not ideal for SEO as content management systems offer page organisation and control.
4. PDFs lack code editing capabilities. Compared to HTML pages, with PDFs you cannot insert an “alt” tag to images within the PDF.
 
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PDFs are clearly not the best option for SEO. This doesn’t mean they are bad for SEO, but they simply don’t put the control for SEO in the hands of the webmaster per se.

I agree with you Shonda, in my 4+ year experience in SEO for my niche (home improvement) I didn't get any serious results with PDFs. Of course, they are a good way to vary your link profile, but I don't expect great results from them in terms of rankings.
 
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I would apply the same rules to PDF's as you do to any other content.
  1. Make it really useful for the audience - engaging, well thought out content will get shared more and PDF's are really easy to share.
  2. Make sure the document structure is correct - this can be tricky if using Word or Docs instead of a dedicated PDF generator - the structure of the document (in the background) may not match what is view.
  3. Logically place image captions and titles so that crawlers know what they are - close to the image is better.
  4. Populate the meta data - fill in the properties of the PDF. Again, you have more flexibility with a dedicated PDF generator but can still complete some of them by ensuring they are filled in Word or Docs.
  5. Don't duplicate content - a PDF of webpage can devalue both of them. Curate the content for your PDF to be unique.
 
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techbat

Free Member
Dec 19, 2014
34
6
London
Just couple of platforms are there that can be used for PDF sharing but not good enough to bring noteworthy traffic but you can use other platform you promote PDF download from your own website...... You will have to work on "call to actions" that can really persuade visitors to click on download button.
 
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Google has already announced that now PDF files are crawled, indexed and read by crawler. Even the links within PDF files passes PageRank in the same way as other content marketing options do. So PDF promotion is now an important activity for SEO. Therefore if anyone is ranking for their PDF in Search Result Page, definitely their SEO will be get benefited by these PDF Documents. But to take maximum advantage of PDF doc in accordance to boost SEO, one must need to optimize their PDF doc. Here is some of the trick which you must adopt while optimizing your PDF files:

1. Optimize Tile of PDF

2. Make URL’s of PDF file user friendly, separate words in title with hyphen

3. Add alt tag to images used in PDF doc.

4. Optimize metadata of PDF doc.

5. Add an intro page to your PDF.

6. Try reducing load time of your PDF by compressing them.
 
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T

The Wholesale Forums

PDFs are yes crawled, offer a lot of knowledge and experience, however we would never recommend using PDFs to get backlinks, or use them solely for SEO. This is because PDFs don't always offer the best user experience. This is something Google takes into account in rankings; userbility is important.
 
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S

Steve Alphabet

Are the documents for actual living breathing humans to use, or just for bots and link juice? I'm struggling to see why in 2016 people would choose pdf over html for anything digital marketing-related...
 
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