Non-html files and metadata titles

.doc, .pdf and .ppt in the search results

[tedster]

Having just spent a ridiculous amount of time on a clean-up, I thought it could be useful to give a heads-up about this area.

Search engines are beginning to index all kinds of files, not just html and images - Adobe PDF, MS Word, Powerpoint and more. Is this good news? Well, it can be a decent source of traffic, but...

These files almost always have embedded metadata that includes a "title" field, and that title field will usually end up being the title of any search engine result. That field is also not particularly visible when you are preparing or proofreading the document locally.

And so, one of my clients had 8 pdf documents online with a title of "Harry, I changed all the m-dashes". Another had 20 Word documents in the SERPs with a title of "a: front matter".

And my favorite, a pdf file with the title of "For Ted". It's not hard to fix once you know that there is an issue here. But it may be well off your radar.