PDF files are inappropriate
Let's face it: PDF files are inappropriate in a SEO-context compared to regular web pages. There are several reasons for this:
- PDF files are hard to make visible on Google.
- PDFs do not allow users to interact with your website.
- PDF files are not user-friendly on mobile devices.
- PDF readers are hard to track in Google Analytics.
- Users often download PDF files, and if you later update the content, users may not see the new content because they have an old version.
Our recommendation is therefore to avoid PDF files as much as possible and instead display your content on regular pages on your website. If you already use PDF files, you can move the content from the PDF files to one or more regular pages - in that case, delete the PDF files and set up redirects (see page 39) from the PDF files to the new pages.
A PDF file can nevertheless be a great way to present content - be it product information, sales presentations, cases, e-books, white papers, services and more.
Search engine optimization of PDF files
Content-wise, the same guidelines for optimizing PDFs apply as for optimizing web pages. This means that the content must be complete and that the keyword for which the PDF is to be found must be included in the body, title and selected subheadings. It's a good idea to link to your website in the body text so that readers can get to know your company better.
PDF file names should be relevant and concise. We recommend that file names:
- has a maximum length of 50 characters including spaces
- are identical to the title of the PDF file in question
- does not contain special characters (æ, ø, å, ö, é, etc.), punctuation and capitalization
- uses hyphens for word separation (not hyphens or spaces).
It can be beneficial to fill in metadata in PDF files. In Word, you do this by clicking the 'Files' tab and then 'Properties' and 'Summary'. The following should be filled in:
- Title. Title of the PDF file, possibly combined with a subtitle.
- Author. The name of the person or company behind the PDF.
- Topic. A short description of the content in the PDF.
There is no length limit on title, author or subject. Other types of metadata can be filled in as needed, but SEO-wise it hardly has any effect.
Finally, the file size should be as small as possible. You can ensure this by using only a few images and a few different fonts. So-called vector-based graphics (which are often in SVG format) generally take up significantly less space than actual images (which are often in PNG or JPG format).
Indexing and blocking PDF files
Google indexes PDF files in much the same way as regular web pages. The PDF files appear side by side with the regular Google search results, differentiated only by a small 'PDF' label. Images from PDF files can be indexed in Google Image Search. Text in scanned PDFs can also be read and indexed by Google in most cases.
However, Google typically does not index PDFs as often as regular web pages. The reason is simply that the content of PDF files is usually very static, so Google doesn't need to crawl PDF files as often, saving Google precious server resources. Here is an example of a PDF file and a regular web page in Google search results:
If you don't want Google to index your PDF files, you can either not link to them publicly (so Google can't find them) or insert a small piece of code in the configuration file on your web server that blocks access to one or more of the files. The latter requires the help of the technical person responsible for your website. On Apache web servers, the configuration file is an htaccess file and in this file search engines can be blocked from all PDF files with the following code:
Header set X-Robots tag "noindex, nofollow"
Tracking visitors in PDF files
There are limited options for tracking visitors in PDF files, as you cannot insert tracking scripts in PDF files in the same way as on regular web pages. However, PDFs typically make up such a small part of the content on a website that the lack of tracking is negligible.
The only viable solution is event tracking in Google Analytics, which makes it possible to track the number of clicks to PDF files (including PDF downloads). This solution can also be used for tracking clicks to video files, for example. Read more about setting up event tracking in Google Analytics here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012044.
