About pdf or html backlinks

Yes, Google’s crawlers can and will grab links inside PDF and HTML files without needing a user to download them

exagency said:

It only brings traffic, it doesn’t count as a backlink to your website.

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They most definitely do count as a backlink in reports, and Googlebot will follow links in them that use the pdf syntax. Whether any sort of signals are also sent along with the link is not clear to me, but maybe it would be a nice experiment to run - what sort of ranks can you get for a longtail using pdf backlinks only.

Google must download and render the PDF/HTML to read its contents, so it can’t extract your links without fetching the file.