Google announced that it is now indexing .epub documents, a format commonly used to print books for e-readers. Google already shows EPUB books in the search index.
EPUB file format
EPUB is an XML-based e-book publishing format based on a standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, which in 2016 was later merged with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The purpose of the merger was to unite e-book publishing with the Internet so that they enrich each other.
Google EBUB Content Indexing
The intention to merge electronic publishing with the Internet aligns with Google’s decision to index (and at some point presumably rank) EPUB content. The only surprise should be that it took eight years to do it. The changelog notes that the EPUB file format was added to Google’s documentation of indexable file types and does not provide any other details.
Official Google change log provides a fact notation:
“Add epub to indexable file types
What: Added EPUB to the list of indexable file types.
Why: Google Search now supports epub.”
Does Google rank EPUB content?
I made a site: search EPUB content, I pointed to the title of a scientific study on eating contaminated fish in Lake Ontario (“Consumption of Contaminated Lake Fish and Reproduction”) that was hosted on the journals.lww.com domain.
I then searched for this document in regular search using the exact match keyword phrase and a variation of the keyword phrase (“Contaminated fish consumption in Lake Ontario”) and Google did not show the EPUB document, but yes the web page that contained the download to the EPUB document.
Screenshot of the EPUB download page
Google’s official indexable file type documentation only notes that the listed file types are indexable. At this point, it’s fair to say that Google doesn’t classify EPUB documents, but Google will show them with a filetype:epub search.
Read the official Google documentation:
File types indexable by Google
Featured image by Shutterstock/Simple Line
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