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Hi, I have a construction website that is aimed at tradesmen. There are 2 goals of the site:

1. To allow potential customers to sign up for a trade account.

2. To allow existing customers to access to products and login to their account to make an order. The site is full of categories and products which should be indexed so we rank for these trade products.

The homepage redesign is where i am having an issue: Currently the site is set up like a standard retail site but without prices, which are viewable only when logged in. The homepage is designed such that there is several call to actions about promotions, services and to apply for a trade account, that apply to both existing and potential customers. At the moment there is a poor conversion to get potential customers to apply for a trade account. This is because there is too much distraction away from this goal and they are allowed to engage other areas of the site freely. The main purpose of the homepage should be to encourage potential customers to sign up.

The secondary purpose to for existing customers to access the accounts and products. I believe potential customers should not be exposed to the categories and products as it is a distraction from the primary goal. Potential customers, i.e. Tradesmen, would already have a certain understanding of the types of products we provide, so I don't feel it is necessary to allow them to crawl the rest of the site unless they have an account. What are your thoughts on that?

Here is my lack of understanding: On the homepage, if I restrict access to categories and products to existing account holders only, where a login is required to proceed, would that mean Google cannot access these pages to index them? Or is this only controlled by NoFollows & Robots.txt? Obviously not indexing is undesirable. I do understand potential customers will need some information about our range of products but the idea is to coerce them to sign up for an account so they can see this information.

The more information that is provided to a potential customer, the higher the probability a person can make a decision against applying for an account. Restricting access creates a motivator to reveal information and we capture their data to converse with them personally. This increases the probability of us being able to retain their interest by providing a customised service based on their needs. All of this I feel makes perfect sense to me, the only query/obstacle I have is the indexing of the site. If Google cannot index pages that are restricted by account access, then I would like suggestions to solve/compromise/optimise the above. Just to address the desired behaviour of index pages. If in search a our product page appears, the person clicking the link would either be redirected or exposed to a login or sign up screen to view.

Thank you so much for your help.

Antonio