Will PDF Become More Popular?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

(Source) Yahoo has managed to score a significant win by beating ad competitors like Google and Microsoft to the opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Yahoo announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this morning.

This is good news for advertisers and e-book publishers. It has been recognized for awhile now that the PDF format is more conducive to publishing e-books because it is a format that has the widest compatibility since mobile phone users can read books in PDF, but generally do not have web browsers. If this takes off then we’ll likely see more PDF e-books getting published and advertisers flocking to get their ads published in them. The only drawback to this is perhaps that it’s Yahoo! and not Google. Although if Google were to roll out a similar program for AdWords it might take off sooner. Maybe they’ll wait to how it fares with Yahoo!

One question that is an obvious one to ask is how will this affect the SEO of e-books. Search engines can already crawl PDF documents, but if the search engines can make any money on advertising, you can bet they’ll figure out a way for advertisers and publishers to make those books more available. Will free downloads be more crawlable in the future? Will we start seeing mass advice on how to SEO your PDF e-books? Will the search engines off up new verticals for PDF documents? We can count the possibilities. At this point, all of them are valid.