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Does Google penalise content that sits behind a read gate?
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Does Google penalise content that sits behind a read gate? Currently, most of the content on our site sits behind a read gate. People have to register before they can view the detailed content. Currently, our forums are accessible to all which draws a lot of long tail traffic.
Google does seem to be indexing some of our gated content, but can someone advise me how they view this content more generally please?
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You may want to watch this Google hangout: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NNf_AhA1gw&feature=share&t=42m25s (42:25). The question is exactly what you are asking. John Mueller says that if you are showing Googlebot your full content but users can only see it by logging in then that is cloaking and is against the Google guidelines. If you show a snippet of your page to users and Google sees the same snippet then that's ok. He said another possibility is to use "first link free" where you allow the user to see a limited amount of content and then put the rest behind a paywall or other type of a read gate.
I'm also in agreement with Egol in the fact that putting content behind a read gate could really turn away users. I hate it when I search for something and find what looks to be the perfect answer to my question only to find that it's behind a gate. The result of this is that I immediately click away. And, for sites that I know regularly have gated content, I won't click on them at all in the search results. If this type of user behavior happens often then there's a good chance that it will be seen as a sign of low quality and the Panda algorithm will affect your site which could result in drastic drops in rankings across the board.
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There are plenty of sites doing this successfully, and they don't have any problems.
I agree with Bill's answer.... but I think that this is something that Google or other search engines could change their mind about.
I write a blog that links out to a couple dozen articles on the web every week. I don't link to anything that is behind a read gate. Why? I believe that most of my visitors will be disappointed to hit the readgate.
I think that Google could see searchers click on a listing in the SERPs, hit a read gate, bounce off, and decide that they did not give the searcher a good experience - and thus demote the content behind read gates. If I was the boss at Google, that is what we would be doing.
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No, Google does not penalize you for having content that requires registration in order to view. As long as you give Googlebot full access to the content so that they can crawl it properly, it won't be an issue. There are plenty of sites doing this successfully, and they don't have any problems.
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