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6 Reasons Why PDFs on Blogs and Sites Are Really Unacceptable:

4 min readApr 20, 2025

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Photo by Christina Morillo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-s-hands-on-top-of-macbook-air-1181307/

I’m not that old, but I remember like it was yesterday when my friends and I used websites to sell our PDFs about relationships.

Anyway, a long, long time ago I wanted to create an anti-PDF website. It never happened, but my dislike of the medium hasn’t diminished. Why? It’s not easy to use, it doesn’t adapt to your device and it’s not great for SEO, just to name a few reasons. For me, it’s time to say goodbye to PDF.

1. Less good for your SEO and measurability

Do you want your content to be included in Google’s search results? Then turn it into a web page. Yes, nowadays PDF texts are also crawled and included in search results. But even less than html. What’s more, the links in your PDF don’t contribute to your internal links.

Interactive elements are still not indexed correctly. PDFs are also difficult to measure. The number of times a PDF is downloaded can be measured. But not how well it is read, or where in the text people abandon it. PDFs also slow down the loading time of your web page, which is also bad for your ranking.

2. Not very user-friendly

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