Quote:
Originally Posted by kapara
hi
i build a site with a lot of articles in pdf.
the articles are full of very important and informative information.
the author insists on using pdf.
how do i tell google about the pdf's and about their content?
someone advised me to put the pdf in an iframe within an html page, and add a div of 1 pixel with the text (or at least extract of the page? or even only keywords?)
this means there will be links to html pages that include most of the data, and the surfer will see pdf.
can it work?
does google allow it?
is there a better or simpler way?
thanks
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Interesting thread. We also work with a client with a similar problem (in their case legal documents). We never really tried to optimise the PDFs because it didn't seem that Google ranked them as highly as HTML.
Our solution was to create html pages containing an abstract with the core information, and a link to the full pdf document. This was also to make it easier for site users as well as the search engines.
As these abstract pages are quite specific in content, they do seem to rank well for the relevant terms, but the more comprehensive PDFs were rarely found (except in MSN).
However, we have noticed a trend recently in Google for the PDFs to rank much higher, sometimes above the abstracts, so I suspect (not verified) that Google have relatively recently changed how they treat and rank PDFs, which for us makes the optimisation of PDFs more important.