Harnessing the SEO power of PDF content - Any ideas?

[JamesBP]

Hi,

Long-time reader, first time poster I've found this forum essential reading for the last few months (for which Thanks!), and wondered whether I could float a question regarding SEO for your collective minds?

I've been working on a customer site for a few months now, and have carried out a lot of the usual optimisation work. There's one section of the site which I think could have some untapped potential though. The site specialises in home appliances, and has a dedicated area which hosts PDF manuals for the products the company stock. The manuals do brilliantly in the search results - A search for a product name usually returns their copy of the manual as the first result. However, because that result is a PDF rather than a webpage;
1) I can't track the views in Google Analytics (the closest we could get to counting views is presumably the server log file)
2) There's no way of enticing the user to visit the rest of the site, as all they see is a PDF manual as provided by the manufacturer.

I've been trying to think of ways to use this content and its resultant traffic to attract visits to the rest of the site, and also to incorporate the traffic into the existing Analytics. One idea which came to mind was to put a redirect in place so that, whenever a PDF was accessed, the browser instead opened a page which displayed the PDF (e.g. in a 100%-wide iframe) and overlaid a small bar along the top with a link to the homepage. Of course, there's a good chance the redirect and iframe could instead kill the SEO power of the PDF altogether!

So, I'm hoping someone can suggest a good way to entice these PDF visitors into the rest of the site, or at least let them know it exists. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

Thanks again.

[priyankeshu]

can you share them the url?

The simplest way is to create a banner in the PDF or create a link and asking them to visit the site.

I don't see any big deal in this..

[Rexibit]

Originally Posted by JamesBP

1) I can't track the views in Google Analytics (the closest we could get to counting views is presumably the server log file)

Embed an onClick event to your PDF links. To and from click stats are about as good as you'll get until PDFs move more towards web pages (which they are every year).

Originally Posted by JamesBP

2) There's no way of enticing the user to visit the rest of the site, as all they see is a PDF manual as provided by the manufacturer.

Sounds like a marketing question, not an SEO question. Perhaps you need to work on your sales copy skills in how you write content.

Originally Posted by JamesBP

One idea which came to mind was to put a redirect in place so that, whenever a PDF was accessed, the browser instead opened a page which displayed the PDF (e.g. in a 100%-wide iframe) and overlaid a small bar along the top with a link to the homepage.

If I were your visitor, I'd think something was suspicious because I was expecting the Adobe PDF bar to come up above my page, not a bit further in. Even if the iFrame had a 0 border, it'd still be nested inside the page further down than normal.

They may or may not catch it, but they certainly will see the change in URL from what they want.

Originally Posted by JamesBP

So, I'm hoping someone can suggest a good way to entice these PDF visitors into the rest of the site, or at least let them know it exists. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

Again, enticing people to visit somewhere is a marketing concept, not an SEO concept. Instead of having boring looking manuals with nothing but text blocks, change it up to a more advertising/magazine-style layout.

Include some links to relevant pages on the website, etc.

[finemoves]

I wouldn't put up any type of redirect. You risk getting that page pushed down in the SERPS for "Grey Hat Tactics" (Googlebot thinks your redirect is malicious).

Instead, do a high quality spin of the content in the manual, post it to your client's site, and backlink that new web page. Once the new page gets to Google Page 1, it will magnetically stick to your existing listing, causing a double listing.

Once that new page is ranking, you can put whatever content you like on it. Buy Now Buttons, Store Locator, Phone Number, etc.

Good to hear they are ranking already though

[Rexibit]

Originally Posted by finemoves

I wouldn't put up any type of redirect. You risk getting that page pushed down in the SERPS for "Grey Hat Tactics" (Googlebot thinks your redirect is malicious).

Wow, good to know that redirects are bad for your site. I guess Google's guidelines on their site and all the Google Group discussion on them being beneficial for removing duplicate content or old pages is just there to trick people into ranking better.

Honestly mate, if you're redirecting the old URL to a new one, there's nothing to "push down" as the content and traffic are already being pushed to the new page.

[JamesBP]

Hi,

Some great advice here, thank you all! The speed of your replies was fantastic too, I really appreciate it.

One thing I should clarify is that, because these PDFs are the official manuals provided by the various manufacturers, we don't actually have the ability to amend their content. The section of the site on which they appear is more of a central library which brings together all the pre-written manuals for the sector in one place. Individually the PDFs get a lot of downloads, but frustratingly we can't edit their content to alert readers to the site - Otherwise I'd definitely use the idea of adding some links through to the site (and would certainly spice up the copy a bit ). Pages containing rewrites of the content certainly sound like a possibility though, I'll take a closer look at this.

Thanks again for taking time to post, it's much appreciated

[MaryDD]

You should check if you are breaking copy right!

[healthtourism]

Article marketing isn't much effective as it used to be due to new google algo.

[JamesBP]

Originally Posted by MaryDD

You should check if you are breaking copy right!

Good point Just to confirm, they are permitted to host the files.