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No. Paywalled content should not be indexed by search engines. The implicit contract I have with the search engine is that it is showing me things that I can se
by bubblethink 2y ago
No. Paywalled content should not be indexed by search engines. The implicit contract I have with the search engine is that it is showing me things that I can see. The publishers and search engines pulled a bait and switch here by whitelisting googlebot. So it's fair game to view the publisher's website with googlebot. That's what the engineers spent their time working on. It would be unfair to let that go to waste.
- Marsymars 2y agoI dunno, it seems more like there should be a user-configurable setting to hide/show paywalled content. If you're looking for something, and it's only available behind a paywall (even a paywall you pay for!), how are you going to find it if it's not indexed?
- torgoguys 2y agoYes, this. It is an affront to the open web to serve one set of content to one person and different content to someone else (unless there is a user experience benefit to the customization I suppose). I place most of the blame on the publishers for doing the bait and switch, but Google gets some blame too. They used to penalize website that sent googlebot different results (or at the very least they used to say that they penalized that). Now, they seem fine with it.