PDF's in site map

should i be including links to pdf's on my site map. Last time Google crawled my site I got time out errors and they were all associated to the .pdf files.
any ideas would be great.

anybody have any ideas?

Yes, including PDF files in your site map is a good idea.

Timeouts could be due to a couple of reasons.

What file size are they?

If you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat or a PDF distiller / printer drive you can set options to print the PDF file for the web so that it lowers the quality and reduces the file size.

This will significantly reduce bandwidth useage from the PDFs and will make indexing of them much easier and more reliable.

If you view the little black arrow at the top right hand side of the scroll bar you will notice that this is document properties. There is lots of information you can add that search engines read. Optimise these sections just as you would a normal web page and they will also rank well.

What tstolber said.

Yet, search engines/spiders won't read the actual content of the .pdfs.

What do you think about placing all of the text on the page and placing the .pdf at the top/bottom of the page as an option so human users can export it as a .pdf, and still have the content on the page for the benefit of the spiders?

Spiders can read the content of PDF files.

There are a couple of different methods of producing PDF files so some methods might not tag the document so spiders are unable to read it.

If you do a search for a term with only PDF files displayed and check the PDFs you will notice some have no information in the document properties but have information in google SERPs

SEO for PDF Files

As to your suggestion that is perfectly sound. Many product pages have the same information on a page available in a PDF at the bottom of a document to give users a rpinter friendly version.

You should definitely include PDF-files in your XML site map. As tstolber mentioned, PDF-files can be read by search-engines, depending on which security option you set. Make sure the PDF-file can be read by older PDF-readers. You should keep your PDF-files small enough for people to download on a poor internet connection or add the file size next to the download link.