Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice

    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

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    7
    2070
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • McTaggart
      McTaggart last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • RyanPurkey
        RyanPurkey @italiafirenze last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • italiafirenze
          italiafirenze @RyanPurkey last edited by

          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.

          RyanPurkey 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • RyanPurkey
            RyanPurkey @italiafirenze last edited by

            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!

            italiafirenze 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • italiafirenze
              italiafirenze last edited by

              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?

              RyanPurkey 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • RyanPurkey
                RyanPurkey last edited by

                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!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Leonie-Kramer
                  Leonie-Kramer last edited by

                  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

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • chalet

                    Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO

                    Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
                    If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
                    0
                  • CFCU

                    Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective

                    Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this.  We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU
                    1
                  • SWD.Advertising

                    Best practice for H1 on site without H1 - Alternative methods?

                    I have recently set up a mens style blog - the site is made up of articles pulled in from a CMS and I am wanting to keep the design as clean as possible - so no text other than the articles. This makes it hard to get a H1 tag into the page - are there any solutions/alternatives? that would be good for SEO? The site is http://www.iamtheconnoisseur.com/ Thanks

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising
                    0
                  • TheaterMania

                    Is tabbed content bad for SEO?

                    I work for a Theater show listings and ticketing website. In our show listings pages (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/this-is-our-youth_302998/) we split our content into separate tabs (overview, pricing and show dates, cast, and video). Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by separating the content? Are we better served with keeping it all in a single page? Thanks so much!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania
                    0
                  • EasyLounge

                    [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 | | EasyLounge
                    0
                  • RickyShockley

                    Buying Expired Domains with Decent DA/PA for SEO Purposes

                    Hey guys, i've seen some stuff about this before but I recently found an opportunity to put it into action and wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into! I am looking at buying a domain (expired and now only 10 dollars) that has a decent domain authority and has some keywords in it related to my clients practice. I plan on using a 301 redirect to pass "link juice" because this client is looking for a quick bump in rankings. Thoughts? Benefits? Problems with this?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley
                    1
                  • team_tic

                    International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content

                    Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant  drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic
                    1
                  • petrakraft

                    What's your best hidden SEO secret?

                    Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome 😉 Answer to all:
                    "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!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petrakraft
                    9

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.