Google and PDFs

A few weeks ago, I came across an interesting post about Google and PDF files.  It seems that Google has very tight rules about how it indexes PDF documents, and you have to be careful about how you prepare your PDFs if you want them added to your site index.

Please share your experiences and expertise regarding PDF documents and how Google indexes them.

3 Responses

  • admin

    What I’ve always done is just make sure everything is setup in the document properties. This has always worked pretty well for me.

    Most people don’t do it and so they lose the opportunity to have their docs indexed.

  • Yeah. I think a lot of people (myself included) tend to forget that you can set meta tags for the PDF files (and images, for that matter).

    I know the majority of our images are well-tagged, as my supervisor (our designer) does a really nice job of organizing, renaming and tagging all of our photos.

    I’m not sure if he does any of that with the PDF files he generates or not, but it’s certainly something to look into.

  • Recently, we posted a very in-depth illustrated article on optimizing PDFs for search engines. You can find it here. Hope it is of help. http://www.francis-marketing.com/b2b-marketing-blog/index.php/optimizing-pdfs/