UK Times Pay wall effect on links?
-
Hi all
Our PR agency has obtained a few inbound links from the UK's Times website. This is a great website with a very high DA, however they have a pay wall.
My question is does the paywall counteract the efficacy of the links into our site?
It would be good to know because if they aren't having the desired effect on rankings then I'll ask our PR agency to focus their efforts on other national newsapers.
Thanks
Gavin -
I think that only works for the google news bot but does not work for general crawling and passing pr, But I could be wrong.
But if Martijn is correct, the question is does the uk times allow google bot allow access to that page.
A quick test would be search for a line of text from the article and see if google links to the correct page. If it does not get a hit then either google has not crawled that page yet or can't crawl the page. And if its been a few weeks and it still can't get a hit in google search then it most likely that its not crawlable ( as is a big site you would expect a normal page to have been well crawled in that time frame)
Side note: I think it would be a good test for someone to setup a paywall page which links to a page with no other back links and see if google can pick that page up ( maybe give it anchor text of a load of jibberish and see if that page ranks for that jibberish)
-
Gavin, I don't know in this case but it shouldn't affect crawling in some cases. For example Google News sitemap could contain a tag (<access>) that tells Google that the page is only available to users with a subscription. So at least that tells them something on how the page is handled. They could still use some work around for Google News to have their pages indexed, like 'cloaking' the page for Google News bot.</access>
-
Thanks Paddy
I guess my next question is; does a pay wall stop google from crawling a site? Does anyone know?
Thanks
Gavin -
If google can't crawl the page the link is on then, then it does not exist to google. End of story.
Of course you have to consider direct traffic benefit you get and with the exposure you might get some additional backlinks from other sites (that have read that story).
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
-
Link Building where link building is dead. Latest tactics in a land of content.
Hello, What is your latest link building techniques considering manual link building is basically dead, and you should really build good content to drive results. Link building has really become less important. It seems to be much more 10X content now. What would you recommend for basic link building considering this besides the 50 first Links video by Rand, which is excellent. Thanks, Bob
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Are these links helping
Hi, We have had a few new links for a client and we are hoping that we can get some feedback on whether these have any link juice. We dont want to waste our time with links that dont benefit the website. Thanks http://thebestmealplancateringbiz.strikingly.com/blog/diet-meal-plan-delivery-services http://mealplanguide.home.blog/2018/11/02/importance-of-diet-meal-plans/ https://besthealthymeals.tumblr.com/post/179669447854/benefits-of-diet-meal-planning https://lauraberbenaj2.wixsite.com/mysite/blog/healthy-diet-meals-delivery
Link Building | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Are links from charities really better than 'normal' links.
Hi Guys. Just wondering about this idea that links from Charities are particularly good. I've heard people say that links from .org sites are particularly strong. But anyone can get a .org domain, it's just that charities tend to use them more often. Right? I just don't get the logic. Can anyone give more detail about this? Is it a myth? Is there quality info on this topic I can check out? We're working with several charities at the moment, and they all seem happy to blog and link to us...so I just wanted to know a little more. Isaac.
Link Building | | isaac6630 -
AllTop Linking Me to Other Sites Feeds, Webmasters Reporting Lots of Broken Links
I submitted my blog to All Top awhile ago and something seems to be wrong with their feed. They're sending people to mysite.com/truth-o-meter.com/this-is-a-post. It's not just truth-o-meter either. I'm getting links that are supposed to go to all kinds of political blogs. As a result, I'm getting a ton of broken links reported on Google Webmasters. I couldn't find any real support option on alltop.com, and when I log in, there are no sites for me to manage. Instead, I resubmitted the site with the correct feed address and in the comments, I mentioned the problem. All I got was a message saying the site was rejected. I believe because I already added the site. But I'm thinking they didn't pay attention to the comments. (In fact the message may have gone through an auto-filter considering how quickly it was rejected.) Is there a way to solve this? Is this a situation in which I would use the disavow tool? If All Top continues to create bad links, how do I stop the issue once and for all? Thanks!
Link Building | | eglove0 -
Links in the Classifieds
We rent apartments. One way we use to find clients is to advertize these apartments in Classifieds. Generally, we use free ads. Sometimes, for very popular sites ( like Kijiji), we pay so our ads can be seen first. Could this be a problem with Google? Some sites send us clients, many of them never do. We keep putting ads there because of their PR. What is the worth of this kind of links? Thanks for your answers.
Link Building | | Caru0 -
Inbound links vs. internal links
Which scenario does more to help SEO - A) An inbound link from a low traffic/low page rank site to my site B) An internal link where one page of my site links to another page on my site
Link Building | | DVanSchepen0 -
Thoughts on a particular company -- Paying for Links
Any thoughts on using companies like Text Link Ads (www.textlinkads.com) to do link building? Seems a bit dangerous to me, but if the articles are decent and relevant -- can it hurt you? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks. MM
Link Building | | MWM37720