How to allow googlebot past paywall
-
Does anyone know of any ways or ideas to allow Google/Bing etc. to index your content, but have it behind a paywall for users?
-
Thanks Mark,
I have been researching this idea from Google, but it is only for Google News and not Google Web Search.
Also, users would be able to jump the paywall by returning to Google News to search fro more links through to the site.
-
Google has a program called first click free - basically, you need to allow google bot, along with users, to view the first full article they land on. So if you have multiple page articles, you need to give them access to the entire article. After that though, the rest of the content can be behind a paywall.
You can read more about it here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536
And here are the technical guidelines for implementation - http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40543
Hope this helps,
Mark
-
Not possible. Google's not going to index something that is not accessible to everyone.
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
-
Bigcommerce only allows us to have https for our store only, not the other pages on our site, so we have a mix of https and http, how is this hurting us and what's the best way to fix?
So we aren't interested in paying a thousand dollars a month just to have https when we feel it's the only selling point of that package, so we have https for our store and the rest of the site blogs and all are http. I'm wondering if this would count as duplicate content or give us some other unforeseen penalty due to the half way approach of https being implemented. If this is hurting us, what would you recommend as a solution?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
GWT False Reporting or GoogleBot has weird crawling ability?
Hi I hope someone can help me. I have launched a new website and trying hard to make everything perfect. I have been using Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to ensure everything is as it should be but the crawl errors being reported do not match my site. I mark them as fixed and then check again the next day and it reports the same or similar errors again the next day. Example: http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/ (this would be a correct structure for the site). GWT reports: http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/category/article/ 404 (It does not exist, never has and never will) I have been to the pages listed to be linking to this page and it does not have the links in this manner. I have checked the page source code and all links from the given pages are correct structure and it is impossible to replicate this type of crawl. This happens accross most of the site, I have a few hundred pages all ending in a trailing slash and most pages of the site are reported in this manner making it look like I have close to 1000, 404 errors when I am not able to replicate this crawl using many different methods. The site is using a htacess file with redirects and a rewrite condition. Rewrite Condition: Need to redirect when no trailing slash RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
Technical SEO | | baldnut
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !.(html|shtml)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /$1/ [L,R=301] The above condition forces the trailing slash on folders. Then we are using redirects in this manner: Redirect 301 /article.html http://www.domain.com/article/ In addition to the above we had a development site whilst I was building the new site which was http://dev.slimandsave.co.uk now this had been spidered without my knowledge until it was too late. So when I put the site live I left the development domain in place (http://dev.domain.com) and redirected it like so: <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl:s] RewriteRule ^ http%{ENV:protossl}://www.domain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]</ifmodule> Is there anything that I have done that would cause this type of redirect 'loop' ? Any help greatly appreciated.\0 -
Googlebot cannot access your site
"At the end of July I received a message in my Google webmaster tools saying "Googlebot can't access your site" We checked our robots.txt file and removed a line break in it, and then I had Google Fetch the file again. I have not received any more messages since then. When we created the website I wrote all of the content and optimized each page for about 1 local keyword. A few weeks after I checked my keywords and did have a few on the first page of google. Since then almost all of them have completely disappeared. Because we had not link building effort I would not expect to still be on the first page, but I should definitely be seeing them before the 5th or even 10th page of Google. The address is http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com I'm not sure if these horrible results have something to do with the message from Google or something else. The problem is this client now wants to sign a contract with us for SEO and I really have no Idea what happened and if I will be able to figure it out. The main keyword for my home page is tile pompano beach and I aslo was using Pompano Beach Tile store for the About page which was previously on the first page of Google. Does anyone have some input?
Technical SEO | | DTOSI0 -
Why is either Rogerbot or (if it is the case) Googlebots not recognizing keyword usage in my body text?
I have a client that does liposuction as one of their main services, they have been ranked in the top 1-5 for their keywords "sarasota liposuction" with different variations of the words for a long time, and suddenly have dropped about 10-12 places down to #15 in the engine. I went to investigate this and actually came to the "on-page analysis" tool for SEOmoz pro, where oddly enough it says that there is no mention of the target keyword in the body content (on-page analysis tool screenshot attached). I didn't quite understand why it would not recognize the obvious keywords in the body text so I went back to the page and inspected further. The keywords have an odd featured link that links up to an internally hosted keyword glossary for definitions of terms that people might not know directly. These definitions pop up in a lightbox upon clicking the keyword (liposuction lightbox screenshots attached). I have no idea why google would not recognize these words as they have the text in between the link, yet if there is something wrong with the code syntax etc. it might possibly hender the engine from seeing the body text of the link? any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you so much! Phn2m Phn2m.png bWr5K.png V36CL.png
Technical SEO | | jbster130 -
Is Googlebot ignoring directives? Or is it Me?
I saw an answer to a question in this forum a few days ago, that said it was a bad idea to use robots.txt to tell googlebot to go away. That SEO said it was much better to use the META tag to say noindex,nofollow. So I removed the robots directive and added the META tag <meta robots='noindex,nofollow'> Today, I see google showing my send to a friend page where I expected the real page to be. Does it mean Google is stupid? Does it mean google ignores the Robots META tag? Does it mean short pages have more value than long pages? Does it mean if I convert my whole site to snippets, I'll get more traffic? Does it mean garbage trumps content? I have more questions, but this is more than enough.
Technical SEO | | loopyal0 -
Images on page appear as 404s to Googlebot
When I fetch my website as Googlebot it returns 404s for all the images on the page. This despite the fact that each image is hyperlinked! What could be causing this issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Netpace0 -
We're working on a site that is a beer company. Because it is required to have an age verification page, how should we best redirect the bots (useragents) to the actual homepage (thus skipping ahead of the age verification without allowing all browsers)?
This question is about useragents and alcohol sites that have an age verification screen upon landing on the site.
Technical SEO | | OveritMedia0 -
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0