All things being equal, would a PDF file rank the same as a HTML file in the search engine results ? I presume that it would, but it is an interesting question and I wonder if anyone has a reasonably definitive answer. Just wondering as we are about to start offering our news content articles in PDF format for downloading, and it suddenly occured to me if this would have any SEO benefits as well as being just nice customer care.
Do you mean pagerank or search engine rank? A pdf file can get the same pagerank as an html one but i'm not sure if you can do the same on-page optimization with pdf files as you can with html.
I dont think you can optimise a pdf to the same extent as an html page, but you sure as hell can optimise them
Several areas I guess. I know Google can spider PDF's - so if each PDF contains a link to the home page and doesn't have the rest of your site navigation linkage - you are going to be boosting your internal links to the home page. But it was more that individual documents performance in search rankings - specifically if Google (etc) consider a PDF to be more worthy than a HTML file with the same content, for example. PDFs do tend to be used for long term quality reports etc. so it interests me to see if Google factors that in at all.
It would depend on the search term. Search for ringtones and google isn't going to bring up a pdf document. On the other hand if you do a search for some kind of academic phrase then you will get more pdfs in the serps.
Is that because Google etc filter out PDF's, or that there isn't a well ranked PDF for that search term? As Google do return PDFs when appropriate, I would suggest that there are not many ringtone sellers publishing their websites in PDF format - and afterall, why would they ? Which doesn't really answer the question though anyway.
That may be the case. More likely is that google doesn't think a pdf document will be useful to somebody searching for ringtones.
I doubt that google would filter pdf's out depending on what the search query was. I think it's the content that matters more than the document extension, and it's just coincidence that ringtone spammers sorry vendors don't publish in pdf's.
A specification document for developing SMAF files and wrapping in an OMA compliant DRM platform is both ringtone specific and also highly likely to be in PDF format. I doubt Google's algo is quite specialised enough to filter document types along those lines