Hi Kalena
When optimizing a PDF, Adobe Acrobat allows users to choose if they want to display the document’s file name or its title in the title bar at the top of the document (File>Properties>Initial View>Windows Options).
During a recent talk about PDF creation I was asked if changing what’s displayed from the default file name to the actual document title would have an impact on search results.
My gut feeling is that it has a positive impact, but I don’t know enough about SEO to actually confirm this. Do you know?
Thanks heaps!
Cheers
Diane
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Hi Diane
Your gut is right! The way you name your PDF file can impact where it ranks in search results.
A lot of webmasters believe that PDFs can’t be indexed, but in fact, Google has been able to index PDF files since 2001. Despite the different encodings used in PDFs, Google can extract useful data from them, provided they’re not encrypted or password protected. If text is embedded as images, Google can even process the images with OCR algorithms to extract the text.
Just like other web pages, PDF files have the ability to rank highly in search results, depending on their content, if they have been optimized and also depending on the way they’re embedded and linked to from other web pages.
Google uses two main elements to determine the title shown for PDFs: the title meta-data within the file, and the anchor text of links pointing to the PDF file. You can influence the title shown in search results for your PDF document by updating both. Doing this gives the algorithms a strong signal about which title to use.
Links embedded in PDF files are treated similarly to links in HTML: they can pass PageRank and other indexing signals, and Google may follow them after crawling the PDF file.
You can pick up some more tips for optimizing PDF files in these resources:
- Matt Cutt’s video: What Are the Best Practices for PDF optimization?
- SEO for PDFs
- Are PDFs Optimial for SEO? The Pros and Cons
- 8 Tips to Make Your PDF Page SEO Friendly
Hope this helps.
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