PDFs not being noticed by Google searches

[Suvannavira]

Hello,

I have a Russian language website with about 5 books worth of text which are all in PDF format. I inhertited them as non-copyable and non-printable.

The site is almost invisible to Google even though it has been live for 6 months and has more than a few incoming links, and is well optimised in other regards.

When looking for specific text 3 weeks ago, I found that only abour 20% of the querries I tried were found by Google.

At the time the server didn't handle the MySQL very well and the site was very slow to load. We subsequently changed servers and the new one allows the site to load much quickly.

Can anyone tell me how to get Google to find all the PDF texts on the site, and thereby make it more visible generally? Maybe with the new server it is just a matter of time, but I don't know?

Any help or ideas gratefully accepted.

Kind regards,
Suvannavira.

[tedster]

Hello Suvannamira, and welcome to the forums.

The first thing I would do with each of those PDFs is to inspect the embedded meta-data, most especially the title. I often find that people who create PDF files do not bother to edit the default meta data and this can cause indexing troubles. I once had a PDF created by a client with the embedded meta title "I fixed all the m-dashes".

You may learn a good bit more by searching with two special operators in combination - [site:example.com filetype:pdf]

afterthought - be sure to check those security settings, too. Some of them may be set differently than others and be causing a barrier to Google

[Suvannavira]

Hello Tedster,

thank you for your reply!

inspect the embedded meta-data, most especially the title.
# ok.

afterthought - be sure to check those security settings, too. Some of them may be set differently than others and be causing a barrier to Google
# getting to them may be a headache, I need the passwords to change the settings of the PDFs from a small publisher in another country who I have never met and where our contact is very busy and doesn't always reply to emails. But I'll work on it.

Thanks again.