Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes they can crawl and index also the contents of PDF's and they are doing that extensively. Its nothing new actually. As long as the contents of the PDF is not only images but also text they will be able to scan the actual text. Interesting article with tips to make your PDF's SEO-friendly: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pdf-seo-best-practices/59975/ Cheers, Cesare

Thanks, Bernadette. The consolidation has been done, and surprisingly seems to correlate with our dropping visibility. Do you have any experience with a "consolidation" that might shed some light?

I knew it that sounded like a Google A/B test protocol! A good rule of thumb is to avoid changing URLs unless it's absolutely necessary. There's a lot going on with that URL in the background that Google knows about....internal and external links as I mentioned above, but also XML sitemaps and usage metrics. You don't want to point them elsewhere and have them re-learn a new URL structure and step through a redirect just to get there. Google has put more emphasis on UX in the last couple years, so improving the usability of this page, as you've done by A/B testing, is likely to benefit you in the long run.

That is really helpful! Thank you! Looks like I'm going to have to get cozy with Screaming Frog, but that's cool. The good news is that his social signals and inbound links are really strong, so I would expect any damage to be short-lived.