PDF Documents – Hate them. Love them.

OK, I hate PDF’s on websites. Don’t you just say “Argh!” when you unsuspectingly click a link only to realize that you’ve started to open your Adobe Reader application and download a PDF file the size of Alaska? And you’re working at Starbucks sharing the already-modest bandwidth with 38 other hyper-caffeinated transient workers so the download puts you into a time/space continuum?

But PDF’s have an important role on the web. And many organizations have valuable content assets that reside in their PDF documents. So not only should you use PDF’s correctly, but you also want to insure their content is indexed by search engines to help drive traffic to your site.

So, in spite of my antipathy to PDF’s, I was disturbed to read this instruction issued to several thousand professional services marketers on a recent listserv post (OMG!):

“The other important thing is to include no robots TXT on PDF’s so the engine doesn’t index the PDF as a stand alone page which is a dead end.”

Huh? Sorry. Not dead end. Dead wrong. If you use PDF documents on your website:

• Complete the document’s properties (especially the title)
• Add links to PDF documents, so that readers arriving at your PDF can always be redirected back to your website (no dead ends)
• Save files at the lowest possible Acrobat version, so that readers can easily open them, and search engines can find them
• File sizes should be kept as small as possible to avoid users abandoning the download

And, please, alert website visitors the link they are about to click is a PDF. No more “Argh!”