indexing pdf files

@pawelszroeder Regarding your concern, ?the plugin does not contain a feature to set a?.pdf?on your site to?noindex.?The settings for media that you are referring to is in reference to the attachment pages that WordPress creates when you upload a media file.?

If you need to set .pdf files to noindex on your site, we would recommend exploring using the X-Robots tag to accomplish this. For example, I’ve used the following code in my own .htaccess file to do this:

??<FilesMatch "\.pdf$"> header set x-robots-tag: noindex </FilesMatch>

?As .htaccess is a very sensitive file and any errors can result in breaking a site, we would recommend consulting with your hosting provider on the best way to implement this if you aren’t comfortable working with .htaccess, or alternately testing on a staging site so as not to run the risk of breaking a live site.

??You can also find more information on using the X-Robots tag here:?https://yoast.com/x-robots-tag-play/

Thank you, do you know how google is crawling pdf / any other docs from media uploads? Will it index always my all pdf files if they are added only in private page? I don’t understand how it works in WP with default options.

So if I upload pdf to media, will this url be visible in search engine even if I don’t add it to page?

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Paul.

Hello Paul,

According to Google, they can index textual content (written in any language) from PDF files that use various character encodings, provided they’re not password protected or encrypted. We may process the images with OCR algorithms to extract the text if the text is embedded as images. The general rule of thumb is that if you can copy and paste the text from a PDF document into a standard text document, we should be able to index that text. You can read more on the subject by checking the resources below:

• PDFs in Google search results
• Does Google Index PDF Files and Content?
• How Google treats PDFs

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