After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate Content behind a Paywall
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We have a website that is publicly visible. This website has content.
We'd like to take that same content, put it on another website, behind a paywall.
Since Google will not be able to crawl those pages behind the paywall is there any risk to ua doing this?
Thanks!
Mike
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Hi Mike, just to be clear on what Thomas is suggesting, as I think he might be getting mixed up between noindex and robots.txt.
If you simply add noindex,nofollow to a bunch of pages, this could still get you in trouble. Noindex doesn't mean DO NOT CRAWL, it means DO NOT INDEX. There's a big difference.
If something has noindex, Google can still crawl that content but they won't put it in the search results.
The only way to completely make sure that Google won't crawl content is by blocking it in robots.txt or in your case putting it behind a username and password.
So to answer your question, yes it's fine as long as it's behind a login, Google can't punish you for it since they can't see it.
I hope this helps,
Craig
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Make sure you make the pages so that there are no follow pages and no index there's no risk of Google penalizing you for duplicate content whatsoever.
Build away. I hope I have helped you
Sincerely,
Thomas
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