Moving a lot of pdfs to main site. Worth trying to get them indexed?

[EcommerceSite]

On my main site we link to pdfs that are located on another one of our domains. The only thing that is on this other domain is the pdfs. It was setup really poorly so I am going to redesign everything and probably move it. Is it worthwhile trying to add these pdfs to our sitemap and to try and get them indexed? They are all connected to a current item, but the content is original.

[EGOL]

Questions.....

Have you optimized these pdfs, editing their properties so that they have a title and description?  They often rank well in the SERPs if you do that.

Have you placed any links in these pdfs so that visitors can get to your site or relevant pages of your site in a single click?  You can place your logo and website navigation at the top of the first page of a pdf and use it like any other webpage.

Have you thought about html pages on your site that hold the same information as the pdf and then use htaccess to apply rel=canonical to the pdfs so that any links to them count as links to the html page?

Now to your question....  If you use pdfs as racehorses instead of mules they can be incredibly valuable.  So, by all means you should be using them as assets.  If you use the information about you can add them to any domain and they will bring value to your primary website.  You competitors can use them and bring value to your primary website.

Did you know that buy buttons from your shopping cart will work within pdf documents?  You can sell ads in them or paid links if you are into blackhat.

Pdfs are really versatile.  Pdfs accumulate and pass pagerank, linkjuice, anchor text, and all of those other link benefits.   I've only said a few things about them here.  Could say the same about xls, ppt, doc and many other file formats.

[EcommerceSite]

1.No the pdfs are not optimized. They are given to us from customers or manufacturers, we do not actually create them. Some of them are close to ten years old and we have thousands so going back and doing that would be extremely time consuming. Some of them are so technical we couldn't optimize them even if we wanted to.

2. They do not have any links or navigation. Do you have any thoughts on how to do that in bulk?

3. Many of these are diagrams, so unless we convert it to jpg I am not sure we could turn them into pages.

I am still mixed on if we should do this or not. I am wondering now if there is an easy way to embed them.

[Daniel_Marks]

Just wanted to +1 EGOL's answer. I would add the PDFs to your sitemap; it shouldn't take much work to index them and they should definitely capture organic traffic.