Posted on January 10, 2013 by Reid Bandremer
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As my partner in crime Travis recently pointed out, misconceptions abound in the SEO industry. Here’s another misconception: “PDF pages are so SEO-unfriendly that you can’t rank for any halfway competitive keywords with them“.
Some SEOs are still so set against the Portable Document Format pages that they don’t feel they should even be landing pages. Some such SEOs recommend replacing all PDFs with HTML pages or building additional HTML landing pages targeting the same keywords as the PDFs.
The truth is: the biggest reason PDF pages often rank so horribly is that they are rarely properly optimized.
Don’t get me wrong. In an overall SEO showdown, I’d still pick HTML over PDFs any day of the week, and you’re not likely to catch me creating brand new web content for my clients in Adobe Acrobat. The real reason HTML is SEO-superior in 2013 is the user-experience. Most people are more comfortable with HTML and experience less freezing and slow loading with HTML. It’s easier to incorporate interactivity and social functionality into HTML pages. People also link to HTML pages and share them more frequently than PDFs(this is big).
Tweet
As my partner in crime Travis recently pointed out, misconceptions abound in the SEO industry. Here’s another misconception: “PDF pages are so SEO-unfriendly that you can’t rank for any halfway competitive keywords with them“.
Some SEOs are still so set against the Portable Document Format pages that they don’t feel they should even be landing pages. Some such SEOs recommend replacing all PDFs with HTML pages or building additional HTML landing pages targeting the same keywords as the PDFs.
The truth is: the biggest reason PDF pages often rank so horribly is that they are rarely properly optimized.
Don’t get me wrong. In an overall SEO showdown, I’d still pick HTML over PDFs any day of the week, and you’re not likely to catch me creating brand new web content for my clients in Adobe Acrobat. The real reason HTML is SEO-superior in 2013 is the user-experience. Most people are more comfortable with HTML and experience less freezing and slow loading with HTML. It’s easier to incorporate interactivity and social functionality into HTML pages. People also link to HTML pages and share them more frequently than PDFs(this is big).
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