How can I specify the title for a Google results entry for a PDF linked from my site?

Question

I maintain a small personal website,which is indexed by Google, with one PDF document (a curriculum vitae) generated using LaTeX. Currently, the PDF and the site homepage are the top hits for my name, but the PDF's search engine result takes the wrong title:

I think that this is happening because the sole link to the PDF is ...as a PDF <a href="cv.pdf">here</a>. Is there a way that I can indicate to the Google indexer that the intended title for this PDF is not here, either in the link or in the PDF itself?

Answer 1

The trivial fix to this is to just re-word the text on your website so that the link text says "my curriculum vitae" instead of just "here".

The current text on your site says:

My CV can be downloaded in PDF format here, and is embedded below

You might consider changing it to something like this:

View my CV below, or download the Curriculum Vitae PDF.

I know it's not ideal, but that's Option 1.

Attacking this from the other angle, you can see from the top of your embed that the title metadata in your PDF document is the following:

Andrey Akhmetov –

I would use a PDF creation tool to change that to something more relevant, like:

Curriculum Vitae of Andrey Akhmetov

Here's a one-liner to change the title using exiftool:

exiftool -Title="Curriculum Vitae of Andrey Akhmetov" cv.pdf

It's possible that once you have a more relevant title in your metadata, Google's crawler might just use it instead of trying to "make up" a relevant title by using the link text. I've had mixed results with that - it still tries to use link text for PDF titles for me - but it's worth a shot, and your title metadata should be accurate regardless.

For what it's worth, I had this exact same issue with my resume at one point.