A couple of days ago there was announcement on Search Engine Optimization Journal that Google can now crawl and index scanned documents. But can you drive traffic to those pages with pay per click and expect your quality score to register the same as it will an html page?
That’s a good question. It consists of two parts. The answer to the first part is “Yes, you can use pay per click to drive traffic to scanned documents”. Whether or not the scanned documents will affect your Google Quality Score is another matter.
In theory, it shouldn’t affect your quality score, but it’s too early right now to tell. Webmasters have not had the chance to test it yet. I’ll give it another week or so before someone announces a verdict. But I would caution you about using scanned documents as your complete landing page. There are some reasons why you may not want to use a scanned document as a landing page.
No. 1, it will be difficult to take orders through your landing page because you can’t embed the forms into the .pdf file. Even more importantly, you can’t insert analytics code into the document and track conversions. If you can’t track conversions then you’ll have a hard time managing any campaign.
I think the best use for scanned documents on a PPC landing page is as a graphic enhancement the same way you’d use a photo or any other image. Don’t make the document your entire page.
