Indexing a catalogue

[garymeld]

A client of mine has a large printed product catalogue that they post on their website as a pdf. Should I take a different approach of posting this catalogue in order to gain SEO value?

[Alex-Harford]

Are the product descriptions in the catalogue unique to the catalogue? If they're unique it'll be more beneficial than if they're not, which could cause duplicate content issues.

Would presenting the content in a different way be useful to the client's customers?

[Everett]

Sometimes catalog businesses have customers who feel more comfortable with an online version of their printed catalog than an eCommerce site. In such cases it can be a good user experience to have those available online.

However, I would not allow them to be indexable.

I'm assuming the products are all available on product pages in the eCommerce site, which is where I would focus my efforts. The online version of the printed catalog in PDF (Other formats, such as flash or AJAX work well too) should just be a feature for users, not necessarily for search.