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Get Free Access to Pay-Walled Content with a Simple Google Hack
- patio11 17y agoThis is abusing Google's monopoly bargaining power to steal from content creators. For shame. (Here's the bargain: "You will implement First Click Free or you will vanish from our search results, to be replaced by the people who copy/paste your articles and put AdSense on them.")
- sorbus 17y agoThey could always make only a portion of their article available - say, the first paragraph or two. Some sites do this for non-paying users. Admittedly, the content-free nature of such a choice might adversely effect their standing. Or implement a server-side thing to check if the requester is a googlebot, and if so give them the entire page, or if not ask them to register/pay. Might raise some issues with Google's cache, but that could probably be worked around (does Google allow sites to opt-out of that? Does that influence their positioning?) EDIT: Having noticed that Google refers to this as cloaking, and dislikes it rather extremely, I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out what would work better. So, it does seem like a bit of an issue ...
- patio11 17y agoYes -- if you do that, Google will adjust your position to "out of the index". (It is classic cloaking.)
- joeconyers 17y agoI use a firefox addon called refcontrol (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953) for all these paywall sites. Don't even have to search.