Optimise your PDFs

We all are pretty excited to know how would the search engines react to various changes that we make on our websites or how would they treat various existing factors on the site. Many of us must have experimented a lot on our websites and derived conclusions through the results achieved. And some of us have our own myths about the search engines' reactions.

One such factor that makes us think about is the use of PDFs on the websites. There are many websites that make use of PDFs. We know tons of magazines that have their online presence also and to make the user experience more eye catchy and lively, they prefer to upload their magazines on the website in the PDF version. But this results in couple of questions - how would the search engines react to these PDFs and what can we do to rank the content in search results?

While I was researching on these questions, I came across the following Google Webmasters forum link which provides a good information about what would be Google's reaction to PDF files on a particular website:-
https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#%21category-topic/webmasters/chit-chat/r3ERzRDZ1rM

You would like to read comments from John Mueller who is one of the Google employees. He has provided some good information that resolves our queries. We can derive from this forum post that Google can read those PDFs if the content on it is in a textual format and it is in the proper character-sets (to check this you need to simply select some of the content and copy it into a text-editor).

There is a better optimisation technique available in which we should ideally create HTML versions of the PDFs. This would provide a better user functionality as most of the users don't appreciate PDFs (because the users have to download them first to view the content).

If you are wary that this would result in duplicate content on the website, you need not worry. Just mirror the content of PDFs on HTML pages and search engines would rank one of them, preferably the HTML versions.

Tejas Thakkar

SEO Referential Integrity

World Wide Web is incessantly providing global information to the users worldwide. In the World Wide Web, ‘words’ play a very imperative role. Webmasters are intended to earn profits and they have to catch the fancy of Searchers to visit their sites. Webmasters through their thorough analysis have to decide what the Searchers are actually looking for. In this day and age the Searchers have become more specific in terms of reaching their desired site. They are now using more and more precise search terms (words). This implies that both webmasters and searchers are motivated entirely by their self-interest and these words (search terms) bring them to a collective agreement.

It is a search engine like Google that provides a medium to bond the webmasters and searchers together. For this bonding purpose Google employs a set of rules called Algorithms. While indexing a particular page, every single word existing on the page is collected and Google builds a big matrix to relate these words to the pages on which they exist. This data structure called an inverted index and is a common element in all search engine algorithm.

An Anchor Text is used to connect a particular word on a page to some other relevant page of the site. It is nothing but a visible and clickable text in a hyperlink which takes the user to another relevant page of the site. So Google derives the connections between two pages through these words used as Anchor text. Very similar to the word matrix, Google builds a second matrix which indexes the words appearing in the links, connecting different pages. Hence a major matrix is now required which not only recognises the words on a particular page but also the words used to link different pages.

Thus deriving a simple insight we can say that the gauge of ‘Referential Truthfulness’ is in the harmony of the text on the pages and the orientation to it.

Google will rank your pages as per your desire and the way you orient them. But it will always follow its algorithms to rank your page. Hence it is indispensable to understand its algorithm and obey the set of rules, if you wish to improve the keyword standings.                      

         

As the users have become very precise nowadays they are constantly in search of very specific results to be displayed. In other words they are looking for the ‘truth’. As Google is committed to show the truth to the users, Google continuously tries to improve its set of rules (algorithms). The three main factors which form the basis of this improvement are the relevance of the result, exactitude of the result and efficiency of the user. So to improve your keyword standings simply obey the algorithms of Google. Pursue the following three important factors to learn how the system works basically:-

·        Theme: It is the theme of the page that symbolises the on-page aspects of the search terminology. It is a way the machine understands the pages.

·        Status: It is the status or the reputation that symbolises the off-page aspects. It is the application of anchor text in the links that directs the user to another relevant page of the site thus providing significance to the page.

·        Authentication: It is a collection of theme and status effects from external sources that authenticates what a site says about itself. Primary purpose of this part of Google’s process is to shield the above two aspects from abuse. 

Tejas Thakkar