PDF Pass PageRank

Google's Gary Illyes said in the comments section of this Google+ post that links within Adobe PDF documents do pass PageRank.

Gary wrote:

Dan, you asked me in Sydney and I told you they [PDFs] pass PageRank.

The question came up as it relates to a security company named Sophos uncovered link spammers cloaking PDF documents with links and keywords and then redirecting users to spam sites.

Dan Petrovic saying "last time I checked PDF files didn't pass PageRank."

Which Gary from Google came in and said "you asked me in Sydney and I told you they [PDFs] pass PageRank."

Generally links in PDF files are treated similarly to links in HTML: they can pass PageRank and other indexing signals, and we may follow them after we have crawled the PDF file."

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