Canonical Vs No Follow for Duplicate Products

[MonicaOConnor]

I am in the process of migrating a site from Volusion to BigCommerce. There is a limitation on the ability to display one product in 2 different ways.

Here is the situation. One of the manufacturers will not allow us to display products to customers who are not logged in. We have convinced them to let us display the products with no prices. Then we created an Exclusive Contractor section that will allow users to see the price and be able to purchase the products online. Originally we were going to just direct users to call to make purchases like our competitors are doing. Because we have a large amount of purchasers online we wanted to manipulate the system to be able to allow online purchases.

Since these products will have duplicates with no pricing I was thinking that Canonical tags would be kind of best practice. However, everything will be behind a firewall with a message directing people to log in. Since this will undoubtedly create a high bounce rate I feel like I need to no follow those links. This is a rather large site, over 5000 pages. The 250 no follow URLs most likely won't have a large impact on the overall performance of the site. Or so I hope anyway. My gut tells me if these products are going to technically be hidden from the searcher they should also be hidden from the engines.

Does Disallowing these URLs seem like a better way to do this than simply using the Canonical tags? Any thoughts or suggestions would be really helpful!

[Hutch42]

If your duplicate pages are behind a log-in you will be fine as content behind it cannot be seen by search engines. You should also block your logged in pages using your robots.txt.

[MonicaOConnor]

I didn't think the engines could see the information. So if I understand you correctly you are saying that blocking the URLs in the .txt file is better than using a canonical tag right?

[Hutch42]

They are different things for used for different reasons. By using the robots to block any page behind a log in you will not have to worry about them trying to access that information at all. You should also have canonical tags pointing to themselves on all pages especially product pages and landing pages.