Moz Q&A is closed.
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.
Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice
-
Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice?
A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!)
Thanks in advance, Luke
-
I'd say it's mostly transferable as plenty of content is found in both news and the main index. News is more of a service overlay that attempts to better handle user expectations for frequency and speed of response when it comes to news items. Still, old news gets into the index and treated like content from most any site so if you have a subscription based model that aligns with what they're recommending for more news orientated sites, at least you're fitting into a form of what they outline.
-
Everything I could find was related to Google News, but not the main index? Is it directly transferrable? Especially given it's the _oldest _content that's going to end up being paid for in my example.
-
As an example, the New York Times does this via tracking of how many full articles a user reads while allowing Googlebot full access to its articles. Sites that use this method employ "no cache" on Google so articles can't be read there and then various forms of tracking to ensure users are being counted correctly. Here are some thoughts on this and more from Google's side that might help you out: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543. Cheers!
-
Don't want to hijack this thread at all, but I was looking for something very similar and wonder if we're thinking of the same thing?
A blog wants to make it's older content only available to premium members - but still retain a snippet of that content (perhaps the first few paragraphs (the posts are quite long) as visible to search engines. Thus allowing traffic to arrive on the site from the content, but not necessarily view it.
I saw that as being against the spirit of what Google wants to do, but was hoping for a little clarity on that. I wonder if the OP was thinking of something similar?
-
As Leonie states, the search engines are for public facing content. If your site is completely private then you'd be more interested in making sure it's not found anywhere other than by members, however it sounds like you have some aspects of the site that could be public or created to attract new members. Typically in these cases you pull small topical samples from the site that are shown to benefit the members and help articulate why membership is valuable. It may be a matter of having what is practically like two sites: the public facing, membership recruitment site, and the private, non-indexed membership site. Cheers!
-
Hi, if your whole website is for members and behind a login and password, Searchengines can't index the website and thus not visisble for others than your members.
if you want other people to find your website, you'll need a public part, which you can optimize for your users and searchengines.
the question is: do you want other people than your members find the website, if yes, than you'll need content that searchengines can find. If the answer is no you can hide the whole website behind a login and password.
i manage a website which a part of that is only for members. that part is not optimized and behind a login and password. The rest of the site is public and need to be found in the searchengines. This part is optimized for on - and off page seo.
Grtz, Leonie
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
-
SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow
I cannot find hard and fast direction about the following issue: It looks like the Robots.txt file on my server has been set up to disallow "account" and "search" pages within my site, so I am receiving warnings from the Google Search console that URLs are being blocked by Robots.txt. (Disallow: /Account/ and Disallow: /?search=). Do you recommend unblocking these URLs? I'm getting a warning that over 18,000 Urls are blocked by robots.txt. ("Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt"). Seems that I wouldn't want that many urls blocked. ? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamiegriz0 -
How much does dirty html/css etc impact SEO?
Good Morning! I have been trying to clean up this website and half the time I can't even edit our content without breaking the WYSIWYG Editor. Which leads me to the next question. How much, if at all, is this impacting our SEO. To my knowledge this isn't directly causing any broken pages for the viewer, but still, it certainly concerns me. I found this post on Moz from last year: http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-impact-does-bad-html-coding-really-have-on-seo We have a slightly different set of code problems but still wanted to revisit this question and see if anything has changed. I also can't imagine that all this broken/extra code is helping our page load properly. Thanks everybody!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Best practice for expandable content
We are in the middle of having new pages added to our website. On our website we will have a information section containing various details about a product, this information will be several paragraphs long. we were wanting to show the first paragraph and have a read more button to show the rest of the content that is hidden. Whats googles view on this, is this bad for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Copying my Facebook content to website considered duplicate content?
I write career advice on Facebook on a daily basis. On my homepage users can see the most recent 4-5 feeds (using FB social media plugin). I am thinking to create a page on my website where visitors can see all my previous FB feeds. Would this be considered duplicate content if I copy paste the info, but if I use a Facebook social media plugin then it is not considered duplicate content? I am working on increasing content on my website and feel incorporating FB feeds would make sense. thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
What is the best way to embed PDF documents for SEO?
I have been using SCRIBD to embed PDF documents on my site but until recently I did not include the link back to SCRIBD. Will my site get credit for this content or will it go to SCRIBD? Is there a better way to embed PDF documents for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0