Any SEO gurus, li'l help with PDFs, spidering and ranking

[hurricaneone]

I was trying to find out about PDfs, how efficiently their content is spidered and how it relates in ranking success to straight html content.

Any thoughts, experiences, would be most appreciated.

Links are OK too - though I'd prefer anecdotal evidence rather than what each bot producer claims for the performance of their individual crawler(s).

[Frets]

Come on man....
That's a boardroom thingy....

Thread moved.

Frets

[OddDog]

google is very effiecient at getting at content inside pdfs.

just test it yourself, do a search for a sentance in a pdf you know is online.
i have no data on direct comparision.

[Loyal Rogue]

google is very effiecient at getting at content inside pdfs.

just test it yourself, do a search for a sentance in a pdf you know is online.
i have no data on direct comparision.

Yes, G is excellent at spidering content in PDFs.
You can even select a Google-translated HTML version of a PDF contained in the search results.
I'm finding more and more PDF files showing up in my search results.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Google, ranking doesn't mean anything more than popularity (backlinks) when it comes to most results so it's almost a moot point to compare the two filetypes.

It would be an interesting experiment tho... maybe if I have the time I'll run a few tests.
You would have to start with two brand new unspidered domains to house the two files.
Pick an unpopular subject or string of keywords for the file contents to make it easy to find once they're indexed.
Then you would have to place a backlink to each from the same page, using the same anchor text, on an existing site that's been indexed already.

[OddDog]

At the en do fhte day, striaght html gets a little edge over pdf content becasue fo the use of H1 tags et al.