Does an pdf help ranking the page?

[deeper]

Hi,
I have a bigger page, about 2000 words, good content and would like to optimize it further with an additional pdf.

The pdf is relevant unique content, more than 10000 words. A link in the page would lead to the pdf for download. Just as usual.

Could that help the page ranking better in terms of panda?
Because of several reasons, I like to rank with the page, not with the pdf.

Thanks,


deeper

[tangor]

Getting links is about having content to attract them. If that 10,000 words is stellar stuff, then you might see an increase. But just because it is pdf doesn't automatically mean "link"... in fact most times PDF is not link fun.

[deeper]

As I want the page to rank, not the pdf itsself, I don't mind it to be bad link attractor.

My hopes are more like this:
A good pdf, linked on the page, is ONE factor giving the page value and this may be recognized by panda anyhow. Similar to good images, a good video... or any other features.

The internal link could show an anchor with the right keyword. The pdf would have a proper filename. I don't know if and how deep Google crawls the content of the pdf, but at least Google will identify relevance.

[lucy24]

I don't know if and how deep Google crawls the content of the pdf

Is it an actual pdf-- one that could potentially be read in a browser-- as opposed to a zip or similar that can only be downloaded? Yes, search engines can (and do) read pdfs. And they can (and do) follow links from one pdf to another.*

:: detour to double-check using an exact-text search on a file of my own ::

That's assuming your file is readable: pdf from text as opposed to pdf-formatted images, because search engines don't run OCR on text. At least not this week.


* I could only think of one place to check this. Both google and bing show the exact text of the first pdf-- one that's linked from html pages. Only google has text from the deeper pdf.

[deeper]

Hi lucy24,
according to this: [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de...]
it seems to be sufficient to protect the pdf by PW or encrypting in order to avoid a ranking of the pdf itsself.

Unfortunately Google then is not able to recognize the relevant content of the pdf, which gives value to the page and helps the user who reads the page.

[lucy24]

You could also attach a noindex header to the pdf. Details depend on your server; I think it has to be done externally, as with other non-html files.