[thelist] Google and PDFs

[Christian Heilmann]

Chris Kavanagh wrote:

> Hi list!
>
> My client intends to write lots of content for his website in the 
> future.  It'd be tidier design if I could get him to write that stuff 
> as PDFs rather than HTML pages.  Now I've noticed that Google seems to 
> return PDFs, so I'm assuming they get spidered now, but does anyone 
> know if PDFs are especially good or bad in SEO terms?

I  wouldn't know any numbers, but I'd assume that any search engine 
still prefers HTML, as it is much more lightweight, and you  can easily 
follow links in it. The PDF indexing of google is certainly a nice 
feature, but I wouldn't rely on it for SEO. You can convert PDFs on the 
server to HTML though...