People are always excited to know how would search engines treat various factors of a website. People have their own myths whereas few people experiment and derive conclusions. There are millions of websites that use PDFs for genuine reasons. There might me companies who want to upload their magazines on their websites in the PDF versions. People have queries how would Google treat PDFs and would they be ranked in search results?
Google Webmaster Central Help Forum has been a one stop source for the resolution of such queries. Following is a useful link which provides a lot of information on how would Google treat PDF files on a website:-
One of the Google employee John Mueller has provided his valuable inputs also which helps the cause of resolving this query. We could conclude from this forum post that Google can read the PDFs if the content is available in a textual form within the PDF file and that it is in the proper character-sets (a simple test is to select some of the text and to try to copy it into a text-editor). But it is always recommended to create HTML versions of those PDFs.Web-users may prefer to be able to read the content before opting to download and view a PDF file. Many visitors don't appreciate PDFs. There isn't a concern over duplicate content if you mirror the content of PDFs on HTML pages as search engines would show only one of them in the results (most probably the HTML versions would rank above the PDF versions).
Follow Google Webmaster Central Help forum for such queries.
