I have a question I wanted some opinion on. We know google indexes PDFs and .doc's and XLS files and I have seen a number of PDFs with Page Rank. My question is, is google able to see links within the documents and if so does it pass any respective link juice. I have looked at a number of cached versions of PDFs which google has indexed and the links look static, different to a cached HTML file. Any experience or opinion would be appreciated.
The situation is a bit more complicated, so a simple yes or no answers won't do. Search-engines can index and therefore rank PDF-files, Word-documents, Excel-sheets and probably OpenOffice.org documents too in the same manner as they do with conventional webpages. That includes (not) following links pointing to those files and (dis-) allowing them to be crawled through the robots.txt file. Basically, you should optimise such a file in the same manner as you would optimise a conventional webpage. The great advantage of PDF-files over the other file types are that you have full control over the anchor text of the links in the body text, full control over the metadata and if you're using Adobe Acrobat or OpenOffice.org you can decide whether or not to allow indexing of the metadata and the body content too. In short: search-engines can index and rank a PDF-files if you allow them to and can pass on link-juice if you allow them to.
yes definitely if the doc's and pdf are relevant to your site it will increase your back links. thanks
surely links within .doc and .pdf's are only as valuable as they are on webpages. assuming the same rules apply (different IP's etc), link juice will only be passed as much as from a .html page.