I have a website I made for a friend where people can upload and download articles and notes and such. I created this website before I knew anything about SEO and want to redo the whole thing. Do search engines treat download links as content? Do they just look at the text or can they actually access the file and treat it as content? Depending on the answer to that question, should I have each file a page or a download link when it comes to SEO? Thanks
maybe to make it a little more clear, Will google count a "click to open file" .doc or .pdf file as content? Can they actually read it and treat it like new content?
Google can index pdf files, but I doubt they can read doc files. Primarily they just index web files. So they would ignore .txt, .zip, .rtf, etc. Ideally the name of the document should be the link anchor text instead of 'click to open file'. Perhaps you could make a button that says 'click to open file', but also link the name to the file. It would also be good to export the text of each document to its own html page. That way you wouldn't have to worry about while files Google can access.
google definitely index's .pdf files and .doc files as well as swf and flash files do a search in google for "seo tutorial pdf" and near the bottom of the first page there is a pdf file. do a search in google for "seo tutorial .doc" and near the bottom of the first page there is a doc file. whether they treat it as "new content" is another matter. I would suspect that those files are not given much weight as you don't usually see those types of files when you do general searches.