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 seen this when taking a look at PDF efficiency in GSC, which had a big drop off for one explicit website in August. I assumed it was an implementation drawback at first, however nothing modified right here and there have been no crimson flags (enormous due to Johnny Herge for serving to me validate this). Plus these pages had been nonetheless listed in Bing Webmaster Instruments.

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

What’s most complicated to me is it isn’t ALL PDFs on these websites, nevertheless 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 shoppers both. I ran a seek for ‘again to high school printable pdf’ and received… not a single PDF consequence. Loads of HTML pages that checklist PDFs, however no precise PDFs within the outcomes.

I’ve additionally Google searched the URLs for many competitor PDFs I see in LLM quotation knowledge, 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 loads of future choices for the way Google can change search outcomes.”

Lily Ray additionally shared her remark 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 publish:

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

I additionally cross-checked this alone website and seen a drop in my PDF pages as nicely.