Seer Interactive contributor Katelyn Sidley has published an article on the use of PDFs for SEO.

She says, “PDFs have widely been debated in the SEO community as to whether or not they are “bad for SEO”. It’s largely dependent on a few different items which we will cover:

  • Why PDFs may be bad for SEO
  • How to tell if your PDFs are harming or contributing to your website’s success
  • How to make your PDFs “SEO Friendly”

Why PDFs may be “bad for SEO”?

Here are some common reasons why PDFs may be bad for SEO:

  • HTML pages are easier for machines (search engines) to understand than PDFsThey are hard for machines (search engines) to understand
  • Often PDFs are not user friendly or mobile friendly. This is because PDFs are not interactive like standard web pages, they are more suited for offline reading and printing
  • Non navigable: It’s hard to navigate back and forth from the PDF to the main website
  • They take up a lot of “resources” as they often have a larger file size (since they contain many images and higher quality text) and can eat up an excess of crawl budget”.

Are PDFs Bad for SEO?

Seer Interactive

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