Google first started indexing PDFs in 2001. The format is commonly used in government, academia, and business environments. PDFs are great for compatibility and consistency. They work on nearly any device and always maintain the same visual look. However, if you’re creating new content for the web, you should consider using web pages over PDFs. If you still want to optimize your PDFs, I’ll show you how, but I don’t recommend it. Let’s explore: PDFs are converted to and indexed as HTML. For PDFs where there are images of text, How To Optimize Google uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to convert the image of text into text. Images in PDFs are also indexed in image search results.
Google chooses pages
Over PDFs if they’re duplicate. If you have pages and PDFs with the same content, Google tends to prefer the page version of the content as the lead version of the company data duplicate cluster. I’m not sure if Google will index PDFs when embedded in another page. Many people want to do this in order to track clicks on the PDFs. There are better ways I will discuss later in the article. I ran a couple tests using an ‘object’ tag and an <iframe> to embed a PDF into a webpage. At least with URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, I didn’t see the content in the screenshot or the rendered HTML.
How To Optimize that
The part of the renderer that processes PDFs doesn’t run for the inspection test and that Google would actually index the embedded PDF, but I’d want to Bold Data test that further before I would rely on it.Just like any page, internal and external links also impact rankings. Links pass PageRank and their anchor text adds context. By including links to your PDF and links from your PDF to other pages, you are helping PageRank flow through your site rather than creating a dead end. Some PDFs get a lot of links. Larry Page once said “It turns out, people who win the Nobel Prize have citations from 10,000 different papers” Check out this GDPR document. It has 77K links from 823 referring domains to it but does not link out at all.