Search engines love text

So if you write a document with some special formatting, that doesn’t fit well into a web page or contains some graphics that must be preserved, you can publish over the web converting it to a PDF file, and let it accessible to the entire world.

Search engines are smart enough to crawl your web pages and index (normally) all the link and documents contained. Google started to index PDF documents later in 2001 so they are not completely new to this kind of stuff, but recently they enhanced the quality and the user experience introducing the “Quick View” PDFs feature.

The reason why Google developed “Quick View” was due to poor quality of the “View as HTML” feature, originally developed to “translate” a file into a document readable directly into the browser (unless searchers weren’t interested in opening it into different applications after downloading it).

Unfortunately the “View as HTML” feature isn’t perfect and often the layout proposed doesn’t respect the original one. These kind of problems no longer exist thanks to Quick View which has changed its approach to opening PDF files, opening the documents directly into the browser whilst keeping the formatting intact.

But, well formatted or not, a PDF document – as any other web page – should be optimized before being shown in the SERP.

How can I optimize my PDF file for ranking?

Having looked into research papers, that contained possible indicators on how to properly optimize a PDF document, I was unable to find anything really useful. Since I’m aware (are you?) Google is particularly interested in details and quality, I decided to spend some time to create a test case to evaluate many different combinations of the same PDF document to understand which factors really influences the PDF ranking.

The test has been published on a recently registered domain, so I can entirely appreciate the results that I will collect from this test.

To stay updated about this test, or to simply have a look at it, point your web browser to my “PDF ranking and indexing test”.

So why is Live search still returning an illegal movie website at the top of their rankings for a popular keyword term?

www.watch-movies.net was apparently closed down and reopened under another domain – which is a different argument altogether – and still returns on page one in Live.com for the search term ‘Download Movies Online‘, so why is this? Why does a search engine that wants to compete with Google still returns a broken link to an apparent illegal website within their SERP’s? There are many legitimate Movies available online – so why is a perfectly normal search query returning poor results?

Take a look at the screenshot below:

This is appearing in your search results today for a highly competitive keyword term. So why is it still there? Does Live continue to reward the huge volumes of backlinks pointing to the website? For some reason the webmaster didn’t place a 301 redirect on the website – which of course would have passed over page value and history to the new domain.

Take a look at the performance of the website within Google, Yahoo! and Live over the past five months:

So Yahoo! didn’t even rank the website highly in the first place, Google did but immediately the ranking dropped once the content was removed (even though there were a vast number of backlinks pointing to the website) and then there is Live, which continues to rank a website highly (amidst some fluctuations it has to be said) that hasn’t be live for over four months……and people wonder why Google has such a stronghold online.