1. SlideShare is the web’s largest document & presentation­sharing social network. As
their About Us page summarizes,
With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it [SlideShare] is amongst the most visited 200
websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and
webinars.
Many brands are turning to SlideShare as a way to distribute content, engage with
potential customers and generate leads via pro features. As an added bonus, Google
awards many presentations with organic rankings:
This combination of native traffic + organic rankings makes this a network worth a look
(particularly for B2B service providers) but I also find myself asking how well search
engines are able to crawl links within the PDFs, documents and presentations found
there. This is, ultimately, what “SlideShare SEO” means to most. How about a test of
SlideShare’s ability to pass link authority?
SlideShare SEO Test
Some time ago, I produced three items to upload to SlideShare: a PDF, a Word DOCX
and a PPTX. Within each item, I created three types of links:

2. 1. traditional anchor text (aka Linked Text)
2. a straight “http://” type link (aka Hyperlinked URL)
3. a linked object (aka Object Link)
Each of those three links pointed to one of nine unique, 100 word content pages I
created and placed in a directory of a site I already had online. The test was to upload
the three item types, each with the three link types and see which of the nine unique
pages ended up being indexed.
Those nine unique pages had no incoming links online other than those within the items
on SlideShare. Once these items were uploaded, I asked a few friends to socially share
my SlideShare profile URL to make sure the search engine spiders had a fresh reason
to visit my otherwise­dormant Slideshare account but the three “Slideshares” within my
account were not individually promoted. Then I waited… for just over three months.
SlideShare SEO Test Results

3. The results of the test are fairly easy to determine. Run a Google operator to see which
of those nine pages is in the index. In this case, that operator is
“site:hotelreservations.cc inurl:/slideshare/”:
Only one of the nine total link types was spidered by Google, as indicated by the
destination page being found in the index: the page named
metal­asset­clears­pipeline2.html. The source of that link: a Hyperlinked URL within a
PDF uploaded to SlideShare.
So there’s your answer – if you want to make sure your SlideShare uploads’ links are
able to be spidered by Google, upload PDFs containing links starting with “http://”
(e.g.http://blog.pmdigital.com/). Google can spider these. While I think this is
valuable information, I do feel it’s somewhat myopic in that simple presence of these
links is less valuable than the traffic and engagements driven by the quality information
that surrounds this URL.