A couple of questions about pdfs on a website

Google doesn't read pictures, it reads text. It would be better to type out the content and use alt text for the images.

Thanks a lot Kim, I thought that was the case, thanks for confirming.

Any thoughts about the forum content please?

[quote=dougkpga;2398886]I have a friend who has a series of pdfs on his site.

They are scans of articles he has had published in offline magazines.

They are available to download and read in a new window.

Does google credit this content? [quote]

What kind of scans are they? If OCR (optical character recognition) was used, then the PDFs contain text which Google can parse. But if they are simply photos of the original, then Google does not recognize them as text content.

No, that would be a waste of text content.

Regular text content is by far the best option. While Google can parse textual PDFs, simple HTML is the best choice.

This cannot be answered without more information. What do you mean by "help his ranking"? Any content has some potential potential to rank for certain keywords, but any details depend on how things are set up and what the objective is.

Thanks for the great replies.

The guy is a golf pro trying to rank for golf school.

Even if he did have content that could be read, the site is a dog's breakfast.

(the pdfs are not OCR).

I think if I sort out his content he wont need the forum to work for him as his articles are very good (if they are seen by Google lol).