How does it really work?

I’ve run some preliminary tests (and by this I mean very preliminary) and more testing will need to be completed to verify these results, but here is what I have come up with so far. When a PDF file was first opened in Acrobat 6 the Document Properties or Document Metadata title and author fields were already filled in with the file name and author’s initials (information received from MS Word)

Without filling in any extra data into the Document Properties or Document Metadata menu, Google used the Title field information for the title in the results and the description in the results was acquired from the body copy. Yahoo!, in older PDF’s use the largest text on the page as the title text. In regards to more recently indexed PDF documents, however, Yahoo! is using the Title field information as the title text in the search results. At this writing, the description text in the search engine results comes from the body text of the PDF and not the Document Properties or Document Metadata text.

Thinking I might just get lucky (and hoping for quick results), I ran a few optimized and non-optimized PDF’s through some of the more popular search engine spider simulators on the web, but these spiders did not handle the binary code very well. None of them returned title or meta tag information and the most popular keywords were snippets of binary code.

So, at this point, does it really pay to optimize a PDF?

The simple answer is, yes. The title tag and body copy can still be optimized and the major search engines will index it accordingly. As far as the Keywords and Description meta tags, well Google ignores this in PDF’s just as it does in HTML documents and Yahoo!, which does use the description tag, is only half way to where it needs to be.

But Google and Yahoo! aren’t the only two search engines / directories around and with algorithms changing all the time, perhaps someday soon either the SE’s will be able to fully read a PDF file or Adobe will offer a patch that will make PDF’s more SE-friendly. It’s only a matter of time, my friend. Will you be ready?

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Kevin Kantola head’s up SEO Resource, a California search engine optimization company devoted to achieving high rankings.

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