Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your insight there Martjin, super helpful.

Yes, the Google drive was what I thought we'd use if there was no SEO  advantage to having people view/download on our site.

I have a question I'm hoping you can help me with. If I upload a PDF and add a no index under the meta robots index so that the PDF doesn't appear in search results when I send people the link to this PDF, does it still contribute to my site traffic/ranking etc?

Basically we are deciding whether to put some PDFs with pricing options etc onto our website or on a google drive. We will be sending the links to potential clients. If visitors clicking on the link would still help with increasing traffic and increasing our google rank (without that PDF showing in results) we thought this might be the best solution.