[thelist] Google and PDFs

Mark Groen markgroen at gmail.com
Sat Mar 26 20:31:00 CST 2005


On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 22:56:59 +0000, Chris Kavanagh <> wrote:

> 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?

They search an awful lot over at Google, but wouldn't count on the
other guys to catch up to them as far as the file types they index on
a regular basis:

"At Google, we are able to index most types of pages and files with
very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include: pdf,
asp, jsp, html, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri,
swf".
http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html

Notice it says "we are able to", not that they do all the time as this
page mentions:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html

cheers,

             Mark

             MG Web Services
             www.mgwebservices.ca

Your Canadian West Coast web site development and hosting solution.


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