Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    2
    3
    1146
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • underscorelive
      underscorelive last edited by

      If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea.

      However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect?

      e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO.

      Thanks!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • underscorelive
        underscorelive @EGOL last edited by

        Comprehensive... thanks!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • EGOL
          EGOL last edited by

          PDF documents will be indexed.

          If you edit the "properties" they can have a title tag that works as well as <title>. </p> <p>They can rank in the SERPs like any other document. </p> <p>You can put links in them pointing back at your site and these links will pass pagerank. </p> <p>They accumulate pagerank and show greenbar. </p> <p>You can put "add to cart" and "view cart" buttons in them. </p> <p>You can give them rel=canonical or redirect them with htaccess if needed.</p> <p>You can give them the same template as your site if you want to put that work into them.</p> <p>There is no reason to avoid PDFs if they are the best choice for presenting your information.  You just need to get a mindset about using them creatively.</p></title>

          underscorelive 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          Browse Questions

          Explore more categories

          • Moz Tools

            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

          • SEO Tactics

            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

          • Community

            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

          • Digital Marketing

            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

          • Research & Trends

            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

          • Support

            Connect on product support and feature requests.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • vikasnwu

            Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP

            We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized.  As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site.  However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet.  So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors.  The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https.  I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu
            1
          • DougRoberts

            Embedding PDF previews and maintaining crawlability/link-equity.

            One site that I'm working on has previously had a great deal of success from the pdf preview content on the site. The pdf previews are quite substantial and rank for many many long-tail terms that drive a reasonable amount of traffic back to the site to purchase the full version of the product. As part of a site redesign, the way the pdf previews are embedded/presented on the page is changing slightly: The proposed modal pop-up on the new site the code looks like thie: <object data="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf" style="width:100%; min-height:600px; max-height:100%;max-height:100%;"><embed src="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf"></object> Where as the old code looked like this: <object data="mt-pdf-previewpreview.pdf#view=FitH,50&scrollbar=1&toolbar=0&statusbar=0&messages=0&navpanes=0" <br="">type='application/pdf'
            width='100%'
            height='600'> It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, you can download the PDF file here.</object> Note: how previously the code contained a plain, standard link to the pdf document. My worry is that without this link, search engines won't a) be able to discover/crawl the pdf content or b) pass any link-equity to these pdfs. Does anyone have any experience/recommendations about this? I'd like to have some information before I request that they add a plain link to the pdf previews back onto the on-page content.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougRoberts
            0
          • PeteC12

            Ecommerce Site homepage , Is it okay to have Links as H2 Tags as that is relevant to the page ?

            Hi All, I have a Rental site and I am bit confused with how best do my H Tags on my homepage I know the H1 is the most important, Then H2 Tags and so on.. and that these tags should really be titles for content. However, I have a few categories (links) on my homepage so I am wondering if I could put these as H2 Tags given that it is relevant to the page . H3 Tags will my News and Guides etc , H4 Tags will the whats on the footer. I am attached a made up screenshot of what I propose for my homepage  if someone could please  give it a quick look ,  it would be very much appreciated. I have looked at what some competitors do a lot of them don't seem to have h2's etc but I know it's an important factor for rankings etc. Many thanks Pete dJSFQwI

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC12
            0
          • Sika22

            PDF or HTML Page?

            One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page.  The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents.  My thoughts were why not make it a pdf?  Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page?  If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well?  The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika22
            0
          • Kingalan1

            Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page

            Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
            Alan

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
            0
          • M_D_Golden_Peak

            Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?

            Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak
            0
          • fablau

            Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?

            Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
            9
          • DonnieCooper

            Site Architecture: Cross Linking vs. Siloing

            I'm curious to know what other mozzers think about silo's... Can we first all agree that a flat site architecture is the best practice? Relevant pages should be grouped together. Shorter, broader and (usually) therefore higher volume keywords should be towards the top of each category. Navigation should flow from general to specific. Agreed? As Google say's on page 10 of their SEO Starter Guide, "you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content ." OK, we all agree so far, right? Great! Enter my question: Bruce Clay (among others) seem to recommend siloing as a best practice. While Richard Baxter (and many others @ SEOmoz), seem to view silos as a problem. Me? I've practiced (relevant) internal cross linking, and have intentionally avoided siloing in almost all cases. What about you? Is there a time and place to use silos? If so, when and where? If not, how do we rectify the seemingly huge differences of opinions between expert folks such as Baxter and Clay?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DonnieCooper
            7

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.