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PDF documents are searchable if formatted properly, however they are not as searchable as plain text or html.
Formatting. When companies like yours first produced PDF versions of product data sheets, they scanned the finished product from hard-copy. This process rendered the text as an image. That PDF document was then not readable by any search engine.
In addition, many graphics companies who had been hired to do the print version, also produced a PDF file but failed to save that PDF document in a text-searchable format. Again, it was a PDF but not search friendly.
Adobe has become much more sophisticated in recent years, providing more specialized tools to be used in the creation of the document itself to identify Headers, insert meta tags, etc. all for better Google searching, however most of the people who are generating the PDF file itself do not know how to use these tools or how to structure their documents properly.
Finally, Adobe was built around a logical structure that rendered graphically a layout that was true to the desired print output. A printer processes information from left to right, top to bottom. When Adobe renders the text to be searched by Google, it renders left to right, top to bottom, as a result, words often lose their relationship to each other. An example would be found on the second page of this PDF
http://wildcard.pctel.com/images_product_overview/pdf_docs/new_medallion.pdf
There are two tables of data on the page. A Google search would see the text Electrical Specifi cations - RF Antennas Mechanical Specifications as one line of text, even though visually these are clearly the headings of two distinct tables. In addition, each row of text within those two tables would be merged, making the text gibberish to you and me. It would require an experienced Acrobat person to create those layouts AND structure the document in a manner that would truly be close to equal that of an HTML version of the same document.
So, PDF documents are searchable provided they are formatted as text-searchable, however there are characteristics to Adobe documents that require special skills to make it a closer approximation of a truly search-friendly document. Minimal SEO is replace scanned documents or very poorly formatted documents with text-searchable ones.
I’m working on a site right now that is going to rely on the PDF, not the HTML for Google content searches. This is a big gamble but it might just work.
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