Watch: Link Juice Hack for PDF Files

PDFs are everywhere online, and they often contain links to other web pages. But here is the catch. Google does not pass search authority through PDF links the way it does with standard web pages.

In search engine theory, PDFs are considered dangling nodes. This means Google might use the links inside a PDF to discover new pages, but it will not pass any PageRank through them. Any ranking power your PDF receives gets trapped inside that single document, doing nothing to help the rest of your website.

Fortunately, there is a way to reclaim this lost power. You can use a canonicalization hack to point the PDF to a standard H-T-M-L equivalent on your site. By doing this, you tell search engines that the web page is the primary version.

In our tests, this worked beautifully. Google swapped the PDF for the web page in search results, liberating the trapped link signals and letting them flow naturally to the rest of the site. If you host valuable content in PDFs, canonicalizing them to H-T-M-L is the best way to stop wasting your hard-earned link authority.