Baidu is creating a selection of clips from PDF content

Baidu has been found to extract content from PDFs to create featured code snippets.

Baidu extracts featured clips from PDF. pic.twitter.com/DcSvA1MRQj

&MDASH; Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) January 16, 2019

This is the first time people have seen this happen. Traditionally, Baidu has taken content from the site to present featured snippets.

Even if I use the same query shown in the screenshot, I can reproduce this myself.

According to what Baidu believes is most relevant to individuals, it may vary from user to user.

What does this mean for SEO?
The most important thing for SEO is that PDF can now receive feature clip placement, also known as “location zero.”

This means that best practices for optimizing web content for featured code snippets can now be applied to PDF.

You can find out more in SEJ’s recent article on search engine optimization for zero-click search.

From the link to the above article:

“… Featured clips are usually won by pages that have been ranked on page 1. Therefore, this means that the success of the previous rankings is still important. ”

To learn more about the success of rankings before improving PDFs, check out these 10 tips to make your PDF friendly to SEO.

From the article:

However, optimizing PDF for SEO is still an untapped opportunity. Baidu can crawl, index, and rank documents, but simple best practices are often underutilized or just unknown. ”

Since PDF is eligible to appear in featured snippets, we may see more optimizations for PDF files.

Here are some key points from the Twitter community: Twitter:

I saw this situation today. A PDF version of an article is breaking the stability of html articles, which may be a UX issue on mobile devices. I want to know why Baidu decided to put the PDF in a featured clip on html?

&MDASH; Tyron Love (@tyron_love) January 17, 2019

this is new. Your case studies and PDF white papers are now available in zero.

The internal #SEO team is now expected to optimize PDF searches. UG

&MDASH; Rich Tatum»∵« (@RichTatum) January 17, 2019

According to my experience, it is easier to steal! I check to see if the competitor has a PDF with an answer box and prioritize these answers. It has been successful in the past few months!