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
-
Best practice for deindexing large quantities of pages
We are trying to deindex a large quantity of pages on our site and want to know what the best practice for doing that is. For reference, the reason we are looking for methods that could help us speed it up is we have about 500,000 URLs that we want deindexed because of mis-formatted HTML code and google indexed them much faster than it is taking to unindex them unfortunately. We don't want to risk clogging up our limited crawl log/budget by submitting a sitemap of URLs that have "noindex" on them as a hack for deindexing. Although theoretically that should work, we are looking for white hat methods that are faster than "being patient and waiting it out", since that would likely take months if not years with Google's current crawl rate of our site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teddef0 -
Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices
Hi, We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product. All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/ Is this the best practice? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Submitting Same Press Release Content to Multiple PR Sites - Good or Bad Practice?
I see some PR (press release) sites where they distribute the same content on many different sites and at end they give the source link is that Good SEO Practice or Bad ? If it is Good Practice then how Google Panda or other algorithms consider it ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaranX0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
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 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0 -
What's your best hidden SEO secret?
Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome 😉 Answer to all:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petrakraft
"Gentlemen, I see you did you best - at least I hope so! But after all I suppose I am stuck here to go on reading the SEOmoz blog if I can't sqeeze more secrets from you!9