pdf's vs html - ease of navigation from search results

[evotsi]

I have over 200 large pdf files that I am planning on putting on a website to benefit our customers as well as add content to the site for SEO purposes. From searching these forums I know that text based pdf's fair basically as well as their html counterparts. The only problem that I have is that if someone pulls up a pdf from say a Google search it will only display a link to the pdf in the search results. If they click on this there is no direct way to access the rest of the website, or related pdf's. Would it be better to include links in the pdf files to the rest of the website, or just convert everything to html format and use the default site menu.

[ZydoSEO]

Not knowing the particular size of the PDFs, the topics of the PDFs, what audience they are written for, the purpose of the PDFs, who owns the rights to them, etc. it's hard to give much of an opinion. So I guess those would be the first questions I would ask.

How large are the PDFs? When I think 'large' PDFs I thing 50, 100, 200+ pages maybe.

What's in the PDFs? Are these "how to" PDFs? Are they something that people actually want to find on the internet?

Which audience are the PDFs written for? Is it a technical document? Are the PDFs written as sales material? What were the PDFs originally written for and used for?

Did you write and/or do you own the rights to the contents of the PDFs? Are these already available on the internet from other sources? Or is it 'virgin' internet material?

If the content in the PDFs belongs to you and it is well organized with logical sections and sub-sections, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to re-organize it into sections/sub-sections of a web site. If those PDFs are 100-200 pages each, that is a lot of content if you convert it to HTML.

You can easily make the PDFs available on your site yet prevent them from ranking with the search engines by placing them all in a sub-directory and using robots.txt to disallow the crawlers from indexing them. Of course, this wont prevent other sites from linking directly to the PDFs on your site or from people reposting them on their site.

Placing key links throughout the PDF to your site's home page and key relevent sections of your site might not be a bad idea(regardless of whether you converted the PDFs word-for-word to HTML, created some sales type material on your site that the PDFs could support, or whatever). At least then if other sites link to it or people put copies of them on their sites, their readers can find their way back to your site.

You could combine ideas such as...

1) Place the PDFs in a folder protected by robots.txt.
2) Convert the PDFs to word-for-world to HTML.

or

1) Place the PDFs in a folder protected by robots.txt
2) Create a cliff notes version of each PDF in HTML
3) If you know the PDFs are well written and valuable to your consumers, you could offer the cliff-notes version online for free and for a small fee offer the PDFs for sale as an ebook.

or

1) Place the PDFs in a folder protected by robots.txt
2) Create a cliff notes version of each PDF in HTML
3) Offer the cliff-notes version as a service for those who want a quick overview, but stil offer the PDF to those consumers wanting to know the details. Both could be free.

In all cases above I believe it would be a good idea to embed links to your site throughout the PDF so regardless of how someone got a copy, they can always find your site.

There are all kinds of things you could do with those...

[Lexur]

You should maintain the .pdf format (do not forget to block editing) adding a lot of logos, citations and, of course, links to your main page: we're in the web.

I suspect Google loves sites with long PDF files with unique content the same way scrapers hate them.

[Alex_TJ]

I sprinkle the odd link back to the website from within the document.
But I also have the bookmarks panel open by default and, as well as links to sections, also a 'return to website' link with a #refcode to track where they came from.