Many documents — white papers, manuals, magazine articles, newsletters, etc. – that appear on the Internet are first created and formatted in word processing or desktop publishing programs. They are then scanned into websites in the same manner as photos, as a whole and complete item. Unfortunately, unless a user has the same program (and often the same version of that program) installed on his computer, the original formatting is lost when the document is opened, creating a mess of unreadable gobbledygook. Adobe Systems solved this problem with creation of the PDF format, short for Portable Document Format. When scanned documents are published to the web in PDF format, they can be read, downloaded and printed by nearly any computer or printer without problem with use of Adobe’s free Adobe Reader. All the original formatting of the original document, including typeface, photos and graphics, spacing, layout, etc., is reproduced intact. The user sees and can print a perfect duplicate of the original document.

While including PDF documents on a website was a boon for Internet users, it didn’t register with Google’s search engine optimization tools. A tremendous amount of useful information was not finding the audience it deserved. Additionally, site owners were not realizing maximum marketing potential from these in-depth and often expensive to create documents. With Google’s new capacity to include PDF documents in search results, the white papers, newsletters, articles, etc. that you upload to your website can now draw traffic and improve your SEO rankings.

“This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful,” said product manager Evin Levey in the Official Google Blog. By converting a picture of text into searchable content, the new technology allows Google’s search engine tools to index PDF content and include those documents in ranked search results. It may be one small step for Google, but this new capability is a giant leap forward for website owners excited to improve their SEO rankings.