Google search results are dropping PDF pages

Some customers are seeing a drop in visibility and indexing for PDFs in Google Search. Savanna Grey noticed this and shared her observations on LinkedIn.

She wrote: “This week I’m seeing a number of websites with dramatic drops for clicks to PDFs on Google. I first observed this when PDF efficiency in GSC, which had a big drop off for one specific website in August. I assumed it was an implementation downside at first, however nothing modified right here and there have been no purple flags (large because of Johnny Herge for serving to me validate this). Plus these pages have been nonetheless listed in Bing Webmaster Instruments.

Then I zoomed out and noticed it taking place throughout a couple of websites with completely different CMSs, CDNs, even industries.

What’s most complicated to me is it isn’t ALL PDFs on these websites, but it surely additionally isn’t solely low-quality or thin-content PDFs that make sense to enter Crawled, At the moment Not Listed jail.

It’s not simply my purchasers both. I ran a seek for ‘again to high school printable pdf’ and acquired… not a single PDF end result. Loads of HTML pages that listing PDFs, however no precise PDFs within the outcomes.

I’ve additionally Google searched the URLs for plenty of competitor PDFs I see in LLM quotation information, and fairly often they’re faraway from the index, too.

The actual confusion for me is that these pages aren’t simply shedding rankings, they’re being faraway from the index. That’s a really dramatic step and impacts a variety of future choices for the way Google can change search outcomes.”

Lily Ray additionally shared her statement on X, wrote:

“My superb @amsiveagency teammate @SavannaLGray discovered a number of examples of PDFs shedding clicks and dropping out of the index in GSC. Are others seeing the identical?”

Glenn Gabe replied to Lily Ray put up:

“Simply checked a website that has a ton of PDFs. Trending is fairly secure and I spot checked some rankings which can be nonetheless there. I’ll examine some extra websites quickly however not seeing a change there.”

I additionally cross-checked this by myself website and observed a drop in my PDF pages as properly.