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Nope. Sorry. Google can crawl CSS, so anything you do to hide text (z-index, position:relative, etc) is easily detectable (Google can even parse javascript). Now, sometimes you can get away with such things, like in a drop down menu for example. But if you do it, be sure to use the standards from a site that is well indexed. You're right, I was looking at that to... hahaha. From my experience though, It's better to have one link.. maybe not much better, but at least a little bit. Does this help Jonathan?

I'd recommend not using the canonical tag here for the following reasons: It's not what the tag is designed for.  By using canonical tag you're saying to search engines, "this page is the same as this other page so just ignore it."  Not true in this case. It seems like the pages you're noindexing are good candidates for it: they aren't pages that would be a good experience for users to land on from a search. IFor product pages that are no longer available, I'd use a 301 redirect to point users to the home page or a similar product - that's a way better experience for users who click on links to those pages (remember, it's about the users as much as search engines), and you preserve link juice.  I'd also just double-check and see if your "view cart" and similar pages are accruing many links; my guess is they aren't.  I'd keep those noindexed via robots.txt just because it would be very odd for a user to click on a search result and land there.  A good user experience is more important than the (my guess is very small) amount of link juice you might lose by not having them indexed.

Jonathan, The "rule" used to be 100 links to a page based on Google having included that in their guidelines.  They've since removed that numeric value without replacing it with another number.  What I find in my large client sites where there's hundreds or thousands of products in a category is the pagination method.  The key is to ensure to append each page's Title, URL and h1 with "Page X". This is best simply because it helps ensure Google discovers all the products and properly credits them to the core category.  By trying to force all of the products onto a single page, and using any method that hides most initially for usability, you introduce the possibility that not all those products will be discovered, no matter how much Google does a "good" job at discovering links inside CSS or JavaScript. In reality, their system is far from perfect, and with all that added code, the possibility exists that you cause crawl problems due to imperfect code.