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
-
GoogleBot still crawling HTTP/1.1 years after website moved to HTTP/2
Whole website moved to https://www. HTTP/2 version 3 years ago. When we review log files, it is clear that - for the home page - GoogleBot continues to only access via HTTP/1.1 protocol Robots file is correct (simply allowing all and referring to https://www. sitemap Sitemap is referencing https://www. pages including homepage Hosting provider has confirmed server is correctly configured to support HTTP/2 and provided evidence of accessing via HTTP/2 working 301 redirects set up for non-secure and non-www versions of website all to https://www. version Not using a CDN or proxy GSC reports home page as correctly indexed (with https://www. version canonicalised) but does still have the non-secure version of website as the referring page in the Discovery section. GSC also reports homepage as being crawled every day or so. Totally understand it can take time to update index, but we are at a complete loss to understand why GoogleBot continues to only go through HTTP/1.1 version not 2 Possibly related issue - and of course what is causing concern - is that new pages of site seem to index and perform well in SERP ... except home page. This never makes it to page 1 (other than for brand name) despite rating multiples higher in terms of content, speed etc than other pages which still get indexed in preference to home page. Any thoughts, further tests, ideas, direction or anything will be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | AKCAC1 -
How to fix: Attribute name not allowed on element meta at this point.
Hello, HTML validator brings "Attribute name not allowed on element meta at this point" for all my meta tags. Yet, as I understand, it is essential to keep meta-description for SEO, for example. I read a couple of articles on how to fix that and one of them suggests considering HTML5 custom data attribute instead of name: Do you think I should try to validate my page? And instead of ? I will appreciate your advise very much!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Implemented google adwords via tag manager do it still require to paste script at thank you page?
Hi All Experts, I have implemented google adwords with tag manager, so now query is still it is required to place the google adwords scripts at thank you page?
Technical SEO | | varo0 -
Accidentally blocked Googlebot for 14 days
Today after I noticed a huge drop in organic traffic to inner pages of my sites, I looked into the code and realized a bug in last commit cause the server to showing captcha pages to all Googlebot requests from Apr 24. My site has more than 4,000,000 in the index. Before last code change, Googlebot are exempt from being shown the captcha requests so each inner pages are crawled and indexed perfectly with no problem. The bug broke the whitelisting mechanism and treat requests from Google's ip addresses the same as regular users. It leads to the captcha page being crawled when Googlebot visits thousands of my site's inner pages. This makes Google thinks all my inner pages are identical to each other. Google remove all the inner pages from SERP starting from May 5th before when many of those inner pages have good rankings. I formerly thought this was a manual or algorithm penalty but 1. I did not receive a warning message in GWT
Technical SEO | | Bull135
2. The ranking for main url is good. I tried with "Fetch as Google" in GWT and realize all Googlebot saw in the past 14 days are the same captcha page for all my inner pages. Now, I have fixed the bug and updated the production site. I just wanted to ask: 1. How long will it take for Google to remove the "duplicated content" flag on my inner pages and show them in SERP again? From my experience, Googlebot revisits urls quite often. But once a url is flagged as "contains similar content", it could be difficult to recover, is it correct? 2. Besides waiting for Google to update its index, what else can I do right now? Thanks in advance for your answers.0 -
Is having no robots.txt file the same as having one and allowing all agents?
The site I am working on currently has no robots.txt file. However, I have just uploaded a sitemap and would like to point the robots.txt file to it. Once I upload the robots.txt file, if I allow access to all agents, is this the same as when the site had no robots.txt file at all; do I need to specify crawler access on can the robots.txt file just contain the link to the sitemap?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
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 -
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