Noindex or canonical tag for products which have no unique product description?

[lcourse]

I have several ecommerce sites in the same niche and there are a high number of products shared among these sites. I understand that having unique product descriptions for each site may be ideal, but for several reasons this is not an option for the short term. Sales-wise it would be useful to continue products on several sites at the same time. Also it would not be a problem if only the product pages of our main store would show up in the google index.

I thought about adding noindex xrobots tag to avoid that product pages are indexed in more than one store to avoid issues with duplicated or thin content or would you implement canonical tag here?

What would you suggest?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I agree with Extimaseo, it's your own personal preference. Somehow I would use the noindex in this case instead of the canonical tag, because you are able to add a unique description later on.

[Extimaseo]

This is completely personal preference. You just need to understand that by not having google crawl these pages, any benefit you would receive from the internal linking structure will no longer help your page/site for the pages in question.