Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you.

Could you address my question about what's best practice? What do most companies do?

I am not sure what the best choice would be for us -- to expose PDFs which compete with their own landing pages or not.

Also, do you know if  PDFs pass SEO "juice" to the main domain? Even if they are hosted at www2.maindomain.com?

Where can I see some proof that this is the case?

If the PDFs have a canonical tag pointing to the parent page, wouldn't this be confusing for the search engines as these are two separate files with differing content? Canonical tags are usually used to eliminate duplicates for differing URLs with identical content.

All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events.

The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs.

What are best practices in this area? To index or not?

What do you / your clients do and why?

Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)

All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events.

The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs.

What are best practices in this area? To index or not?

What do you / your clients do and why?

Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)