I harp on the importance of link diversity, all the time and how you should always be looking for different places, or perhaps better said “sources”, to get links regardless of the juice they may send your way. But what about not live links, how do they affect SEO?

Not Live Links

One source webmasters may not consider is links embedded within a PDF file. PDF files are also the technical names for eBooks and while you may use one as an incentive to get someone to sign up for your list or just make it an outright purchasable product online, hosting an eBook you have written somewhere online can be another effective source of link juice for your site.

You can host an eBook on your site and point that juice elsewhere or you can host it on someone else’s site. In the latter, you can include embedded links which not only people can click on to navigate to your site but search engines can take into consideration, as well. A good contextual link can yield a lot of click throughs, so this can be an invaluable source of traffic, as well, depending on how many people read it. Publishing your eBook to a PDF or document hosting site is a quick way to get some quick link juice and potentially a lot of traffic, as well.

Generally with an eBook there are no rules about what anchor text you can or cannot use since it’s part of the book/PDF, so you can get targeted relevant links pointing to whichever page online you want which is another bonus.

I mentioned it can be a valuable source of link juice as far as search engines are concerned. This brings me to an important point. “Live” or clickable links whether they be plain URLs or clickable anchor text which will navigate whomever clicks on it to the destination URL are ideal, but some sites won’t allow clickable text. Instead you can just include the URL which you want to point to and assume that if someone really cares enough to visit it they’ll copy and paste it in their browser. The real point to be made here is that search engine crawling spiders will still count this as a link and crawl it accordingly, assigning link juice.

We don’t call these “dead” links as that term is reserved for (ironically enough) live links which go to dead ends where that destination URL is no longer active. Whatever you want to call these links, again it’s not ideal from a user perspective but most spiders will still be able to crawl that destination page like they would a live link, so don’t count them out when all else fails.