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 taking a look at PDF efficiency in GSC, which had a major drop off for one explicit web site in August. I assumed it was an implementation drawback at first, however nothing modified right here and there have been no purple flags (big due to 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 occurring throughout a number of websites with totally different CMSs, CDNs, even industries.

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

It’s not simply my purchasers both. I ran a seek for ‘again to highschool printable pdf’ and bought… not a single PDF outcome. Loads of HTML pages that record PDFs, however no precise PDFs within the outcomes.

I’ve additionally Google searched the URLs for many 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 a way Google can change search outcomes.”

Lily Ray additionally shared her commentary on X, wrote:

“My wonderful @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 publish:

“Simply checked a web site 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 alone web site and observed a drop in my PDF pages as nicely.