Adding PDF to informational page

[luxer]

Quick question to everyone,

I have a page that is ranking well and would like to add some more info to it in the form of a downloadable PDF. I am unsure how Google views this. (Can they read downloadable files? are they viewed as possible spam?)

My goal is to add more valuable information, and hopefully show a good signal when people download the document. I really have no clue how Google views this.

Anyone have any insight or experience with this?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Ryuzaki]

Yes, Google crawls, indexes, and reads PDF files. They shouldn't be viewed as spam. They're seen as a webpage, so a link to a PDF you upload is an internal link to another page on your site as far as they're concerned.

They used to have a search operator filetype you could use like filetype:PDF but I can't get it to work. But here's some PDF's indexed in Google:

You see the PDF icon on the right of the breadcrumbs. They eat them up just like any other page. It's perfectly fine.

 

[Darth]

I did this recently, in the form of a printable version of the main info content of the webpage. All in the name of better user experience. Don't think it has had any effect yet