Indexing content behind a login
-
Hi,
I manage a website within the pharmaceutical industry where only healthcare professionals are allowed to access the content. For this reason most of the content is behind a login.
My challenge is that we have a massive amount of interesting and unique content available on the site and I want the healthcare professionals to find this via Google!
At the moment if a user tries to access this content they are prompted to register / login. My question is that if I look for the Google Bot user agent and allow this to access and index the content will this be classed as cloaking? I'm assuming that it will.
If so, how can I get around this? We have a number of open landing pages but we're limited to what indexable content we can have on these pages!
I look forward to all of your suggestions as I'm struggling for ideas now!
Thanks
Steve
-
Thanks everyone... It's not as restrictive as patient records... Basically, because of the way our health service works in the UK we are not allowed to promote material around our medicines to patients, it should be restricted only to HCP's. If we are seen to be actively promoting to patients we run the risk of a heavy fine.
For this reason we need to take steps to ensure that we only target this information towards HCP's and therefore we require them to register before being able to access the content...
My issue is that HCP's may search for a Brand that we supply but we have to be very careful what Brand information we provide outside of log-in. Therefore the content we can include on landing pages cannot really be optimised for the keywords that they are searching for! Hence why I want the content behind log-in indexed but not easily available without registering...
It's a very difficult place to be!
-
I guess I was just hoping for that magic answer that doesn't exist! It's VERY challenging to optimise a site with these kinds of restrictions but I get I just need to put what I can on the landing pages and optimise as best I can with the content I can show!
We also have other websites aimed at patients where all the content is open so I guess I'll just have to enjoy optimising these instead
Thanks for all your input!
Steve
-
Steve,
Yes that would be cloaking. I wouldn't do that.
As Pete mentioned below, your only real options at this point are to make some of the content, or new content, available for public use. If you can't publish abstracts at least, then you'll have to invest in copywriting content that is legally available for the public to get traffic that way, and do your best to convert them into subscribers.
-
Hi Steve
If it can only be viewed legally by health practitioners who are members of your site, then it seems to me you don't have an option as by putting any of this content into the public domain on Google by whatever method you use will be deemed illegal by whichever body oversees it.
Presumably you cannot also publish short 25o word summaries of the content?
If not, then I think you need to create pages that are directly targeted at marketing the site to health practitioners. Whilst the pages won't be able to contain the content you want to have Google index, they could still contain general information and the benefits of becoming a subscriber.
Isn't that the goal of the site anyway, i.e. to be a resource to health practitioners? So, without being able to make the content public, you have to market to them through your SEO or use some other form or indirect or direct marketing to encourage them to the site to sign up.
I hope that helps,
Peter -
Thanks all... Unfortunately it is a legal requirement that the content is not made publicly available but the challenge then is how do people find it online!
I've looked at first click free and pretty much ever other option I could think of and yet to find a solution
My only option is to allow Google Bot through the authentication which will allow it to index the content but my concern is that this is almost certainly cloaking...
-
Please try looking at "First Click Free" by Google
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/74536?hl=en
I think this is along the lines of what you are looking for.
-
Hi Steve
As you already know, if a page is not crawlable it's not indexable. I don't think there is any way around this without changing the strategy of the site. You said, _"We have a number of open landing pages but we're limited to what indexable content we can have on these pages". _Is that limitation imposed by a legal requirement or something like that, or by the site owners because they don't want to give free access?
If the marketing strategy for the site is to grow the membership, then as it's providing a content service to its members then it has to give potential customers a sample of its wares.
I think there are two possible solutions.
(1) increase the amount of free content available on the site to give the search engines more content to crawl and make available to people searching or
(2) Provide a decent size excerpt, say the first 250 words of each article as a taster for potential customers and put the site login at the point of the "read more". That way you give the search engines something to get their teeth into which is of a decent length but it's also a decent size teaser to give potential customers an appetite to subscribe.
I hope that helps,
Peter
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving content form Non-performing site to performing site - wihtout 301 Redirection
I have 2 different websites: one have good amount of traffic and another have No Traffic at all. I have a website that has lots of valuable content But no traffic. And I want to move the content of non-performing site to performing site. (Don't want to redirect) My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to "noindex" on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the performing domain to be indexed again. So, I was wondering If it will create any copied content issue or not? What should i have to take care of when I am going to move content from one site to another?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Page drops from index completely
We have a page that is ranking organically at #1 but over the past couple of months the page has twice dropped from a search term entirely. There don't appear to be any issues with the page in Search Console and adding the page on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url seems to fix the issue. The search term we're tracking that drops is in the URL for the page and is the h1 of the page. Here is a screenshot of the ranking over the past few months: https://jmp.sh/akvaKGF What could cause this to happen? There is nothing in search console that shows any problems with the page. The last time this happened the page completely dropped on all search terms and showed up again after submitting the url to google manually. This time it dropped on just one search term and reappeared the next day after manually submitting the page again. akvaKGF
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | russell_ms0 -
Chinese search engine indexation
Hello, I have read that it is vital for a site to be indexed in Chinese search engines that it needs to be hosted in China on a server with a Chinese IP address, is this true? The site in question is a .cn site, hosted in USA currently, but served via CloudFlare (which has locations in China). Any advice on how to rank a Chinese site would be greatly appreciated, including if you know anyone who I can hire to create a Chinese sitemap file to submit to Chinese search engines (and even optimise the site). Many thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uworlds
Mark0 -
Is Syndicated (Duplicate) Content considered Fresh Content?
Hi all, I've been asking quite a bit of questions lately and sincerely appreciate your feedback. My co-workers & I have been discussing content as an avenue outside of SEO. There is a lot of syndicated content programs/plugins out there (in a lot of cases duplicate) - would this be considered fresh content on an individual domain? An example may clearly show what I'm after: domain1.com is a lawyer in Seattle.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby
domain2.com is a lawyer in New York. Both need content on their website relating to being a lawyer for Google to understand what the domain is about. Fresh content is also a factor within Google's algorithm (source: http://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor). Therefore, fresh content is needed on their domain. But what if that content is duplicate, does it still hold the same value? Question: Is fresh content (adding new / updating existing content) still considered "fresh" even if it's duplicate (across multiple domains). Purpose: domain1.com may benefit from a resource for his/her local clientale as the same would domain2.com. And both customers would be reading the "duplicate content" for the first time. Therefore, both lawyers will be seen as an authority & improve their website to rank well. We weren't interested in ranking the individual article and are aware of canonical URLs. We aren't implementing this as a strategy - just as a means to really understand content marketing outside of SEO. Conclusion: IF duplicate content is still considered fresh content on an individual domain, then couldn't duplicate content (that obviously won't rank) still help SEO across a domain? This may sound controversial & I desire an open-ended discussion with linked sources / case studies. This conversation may tie into another Q&A I posted: http://moz.com/community/q/does-duplicate-content-actually-penalize-a-domain. TLDR version: Is duplicate content (same article across multiple domains) considered fresh content on an individual domain? Thanks so much, Cole0 -
Content placement in HTML and display
Does Google penalize for content being placed at the top of the page and display for users at bottom of the page? This technique is done by CSS. Thank you in advance for your feedback!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aerocasillas0 -
Should we remove our "index" pages (alphabetical link list to all of the products on the site)?
We run an e-commerce site with a large number of product families, with each family having a number of products within it. We have a set of pages (26 - one for each letter A-Z) that are lists of links to the product family pages. We originally created these pages thinking it would aid in discoverability of these pages to search engines, of course as time has gone on, techniques like this have fallen out of favor with Google as it provides negligible value to the user. Should we consider removing these pages from the site overall? Is it possible that it could be viewed by Panda as resembling a link farm? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI1 -
Is using Zeus's gateway feature to display contents from the different URL OK to do?
I've been writing a blog on free hosting blog platform and planning to migrate that under my domain name as directory. myblog.ABCD.com to www.mydomain.com/myblog now, I've learned that my Zeus server has a way to show myblog.ABCD.com at mydomain.com/myblog without transferring anything by using the Gateway feature. This will save a lot of time and hassle for me, but my question is if this is ok to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HypermediaSystems
Is there a chance that this could be considered a blackhat even though the content is mine? From the Zeus documentation:
"Gateway aliases enable users to request files from the new
web server, and receive them as if they were on the new server, when they are
still located on the legacy server. To the user, the files appear to be located on
the new server. " Thank you.0 -
Duplicate content or not? If you're using abstracts from external sources you link to
I was wondering if a page (a blog post, for example) that offers links to external web pages along with abstracts from these pages would be considered duplicate content page and therefore penalized by Google. For example, I have a page that has very little original content (just two or three sentences that summarize or sometimes frame the topic) followed by five references to different external sources. Each reference contains a title, which is a link, and a short abstract, which basically is the first few sentences copied from the page it links to. So, except from a few sentences in the beginning everything is copied from other pages. Such a page would be very helpful for people interested in the topic as the sources it links to had been analyzed before, handpicked and were placed there to enhance user experience. But will this format be considered duplicate or near-duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | romanbond0