UK Times Pay wall effect on links?
-
Hi all
Our PR agency has obtained a few inbound links from the UK's Times website. This is a great website with a very high DA, however they have a pay wall.
My question is does the paywall counteract the efficacy of the links into our site?
It would be good to know because if they aren't having the desired effect on rankings then I'll ask our PR agency to focus their efforts on other national newsapers.
Thanks
Gavin -
I think that only works for the google news bot but does not work for general crawling and passing pr, But I could be wrong.
But if Martijn is correct, the question is does the uk times allow google bot allow access to that page.
A quick test would be search for a line of text from the article and see if google links to the correct page. If it does not get a hit then either google has not crawled that page yet or can't crawl the page. And if its been a few weeks and it still can't get a hit in google search then it most likely that its not crawlable ( as is a big site you would expect a normal page to have been well crawled in that time frame)
Side note: I think it would be a good test for someone to setup a paywall page which links to a page with no other back links and see if google can pick that page up ( maybe give it anchor text of a load of jibberish and see if that page ranks for that jibberish)
-
Gavin, I don't know in this case but it shouldn't affect crawling in some cases. For example Google News sitemap could contain a tag (<access>) that tells Google that the page is only available to users with a subscription. So at least that tells them something on how the page is handled. They could still use some work around for Google News to have their pages indexed, like 'cloaking' the page for Google News bot.</access>
-
Thanks Paddy
I guess my next question is; does a pay wall stop google from crawling a site? Does anyone know?
Thanks
Gavin -
If google can't crawl the page the link is on then, then it does not exist to google. End of story.
Of course you have to consider direct traffic benefit you get and with the exposure you might get some additional backlinks from other sites (that have read that story).
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
-
A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?
There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
Link over-building?
Hello all. One of the first things we do for our clients is to claim their local listings, include them on a set of selected directories (8-10), and blog directories (5), if applicable. Since they will all be linked to the client site, could doing all of this at once run us into problems with unnatural link growth? Thanks! Frank
Link Building | | FrankSweeney0 -
Using an SEO Agency to build one-way links for you via link exchange
There are a number of SEO agencies which offer link building as part of their SEO offerings. I believe they build one-way links to the client site, by offering another link in exchange to the liking site. So, if the client site is "C", and link is being requested from site "A", the site "A" owner is offered a link from site "B" in return. Is this a good and/or recommended practice?
Link Building | | thinkvidya0 -
Do sites on the same c-block and same server count as seperate linking root domains when linking to each other?
Lets say there are 50 businesses who have their website on the same server and are on the same c-block but the owners of the individual sites are different (i.e. they are all completely different sites not relevant to each other). Each of those sites are linking to each other due to a feature on the sites. This obviously increases the number of total links to each site but does it also increase the number of linking root domains? Or does this just show up as one linking root domain due to all of them being on the same server and the sharing the same c-block?
Link Building | | cinternicola0 -
Linking from Blogs
Hi I like to link from blogs on similar keywords on a regular basis but I am thinking about changing tactics as it can appear monotonous and un natural. What are peoples experiences in linking from blogs ?
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Thoughts on a particular company -- Paying for Links
Any thoughts on using companies like Text Link Ads (www.textlinkads.com) to do link building? Seems a bit dangerous to me, but if the articles are decent and relevant -- can it hurt you? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks. MM
Link Building | | MWM37720 -
Internal linking
I 'am using a seo component (sh404sef) for a joomla website, for the time being, any internal linking is organized. I've been said the sitelinkx is not advised (a component dedicated to build internal links) with sh404sef... How could i manage to set it up fastly ? Tks a lot..
Link Building | | mozllo0 -
Acquiring a link
once I get a list of links from ontolo or the link acquisition assitant here on seomoz what is the next step? do i email that site? what do i actually do to get acquire the link? thank you for answering this! I am new to link building and so new that I dont actually know the steps and need help from someone. thank you VIjay
Link Building | | vijayvasu0