7 replies to this topic

[Tyl3r]

Our development firm is working with a local newspaper that wants to have it's articles indexed by search engines and then when someone clicks on the link found on the search engine, it will take them to a login or 'subscribe now' page.

Is this possible? Are there caching implications?

[Jill]

It's not possible without cloaking. Although they may be able to make a deal with Google to do this.

The other way to do it is to create summary pages of each article which you allow Google to index and to read the entire article you have to then register.

[Catz]

Those are the most irritating article links to come across!

When I click an article link that takes me to a page requiring login or a subscription to see, it's just like false advertising. I can't click the Back button quickly enough

They should try to track how many other people do the exact same thing.

[ogormask]

Its annoying but its what some of the top newspapers are doing. Go to the NYT or Washington Post. Some articles are free to read and a lot require you to register to read it.

I guess someone told them that if you glean enough email addies and spam the crap out of them that you will somehow get more subscriptions. What I find is that I know I am going to get spammed and then either block emails from that address or just ignore them entirely.

[harpsound]

I guess someone told them that if you glean enough email addies and spam the crap out of them that you will somehow get more subscriptions. What I find is that I know I am going to get spammed and then either block emails from that address or just ignore them entirely.

Or Google a "10 word phrase" from the visible text in quotes and find the article elsewhere.
Usually works for me.

S

[Catz]

That's right, it is usually available from another source online, which is why I hit that back button so quickly.

[Randy]

Or...

Just view the Cache version directly from Google when they do that.

Back to the original question from Tyl3r.

If you're going to do the cloaking thing to show such content to the search engine spiders but not to real users, make damned sure you have the search engines agreement to cloak it. I've been told by people at the search engines it's one of those things that often generate complaints directly to them. Which of course gets them looking a lot more closely and putting the entire site under a lot more scrutiny than normal. Trust me, you don't want that!

What I've seen some doing is letting the original question be out there in the public, but the answers behind password protection. Questions tend to contain the same keyword phrases others will use to find an answer, so can generate signups. Just make sure you're very, very clear and treat the search engine spiders exactly as you treat real, unregistered users.

[Andy LoCascio]

We have dealt with this issue several times before, and this is what we have learned.

Trying to contact Google is a complete and total waste of time. A local newspaper will certainly struggle to arrange somehting like this. You should make no attempt to cloak the content to fool the search engines. That willeventually result in a penalty that will be difficult to remove.

The best and most commonly used method is to have a visible tease or synopsis (cached text) followed by a link that leads to the password protected content (not cached). It is also a great way to end up with the right keyword densities.

Really saavy sites edit the content of the tease so that it contains the most likely search phrases. We even built one of our clients a tool that scans the article for keyword phrases (in a database we provided) and then displays a list ranked in descending order by daily searches. The Compendium blogging tool does something similar to this (it even shows keyword densities).