543 - We are building a website which would contain medical information only. The website will be gated with a registration & log-in process that only allows entry to Canadian HCPs. In an effort to improve the search engine ranking of our website, we would like to optimize our website for organic search (SEO), which would include using a JavaScript log-in page that would allow search engines to crawl the pages beyond the gate. We would not offer the ability to access content on the website without registration and login validation, the purpose of allowing search engines to crawl the pages beyond the gate is simply to allow our website to appear in organic search rankings for specific key word searches. Is this permissible under the Code?
-
Medical information relating to Rx products would exceed the name, price, quantity restriction in C.01.004 of the Food and Drug Regulations. It is important that the information appear after a gate which restricts access to HCPs AND that the manufacturer takes effective steps to ensure that post gate pages do not appear as organic search results when enable the composite of the keyword, the meta title, the meta descriptors, the link URL, and the link webpage to exceed name, price, and quantity. A no index robot command on each page post gate is a robust mechanism for accomplishing this objective. Note that the issue is not whether the search engine has the ability to crawl the post gate pages. Rather, the issue is whether they have the ability to report what they see while crawling in search results. Adding the no-index tag to pages in the section preserves your PageRank as Google is still able to crawl it (but it won’t index it).Also note that pregate pages do not require the no-index command.
