Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?

[rayvensoft]

Hi,

I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use.  The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site.  The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files.  So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit?

While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site.   So do I get any benefit from these great links?  If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them.  Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government.

Thanks.

[gfiorelli1]

Links in PDF do pass link equity. Be sure though that the PDF are correctly saved as text not image.

I warmly suggest you to read this great guide about SEO for PDF by Lunametrics.

[PaddyDisplays]

I would think that you would still get benefit from the link on a domain level, but not as good as link to a proper page (as you pointed out).

You could 301 redirect the links to a landing page for the pdf file, but should you? I don't know.

Still it weird that a government site is hotlinking files on your site, I would have thought that would be bad practice from their side.  Still its good news for you.