How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
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How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
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Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#2Or simply use incognito mode and click on Google search result.
Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#3Or simply use incognito mode and click on Google search result.
Did you read the article. It talks about how that trick no longer works on a lot of sites because they are now checking User-Agent strings too.
Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#4Doesn't this kind of also hurt SEO? I'm would guess Google has some automated system to detect and apply a negative signal to sites that provide different content to a Googlebot user agent than a non-Googlebot user agent. I guess these sites are counting that the other signals outweigh that negative hit.
Otherwise, why would expertsexchange be obligated to provide the answers at the very bottom? Did something change?
Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#5[deleted]
Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#6If this is true, what WSJ is doing is called "cloaking" and should cause it to get de-indexed: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#7If they're now blocking clicks from Google, doesn't that mean that they're cloaking and violating the Google's Webmaster Guidelines [1]?
[1]: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#8Well, that trick won't last long either. It's trivial to verify that an IP indeed belongs to Google:
Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#9If they're now blocking clicks from Google, doesn't that mean that they're cloaking and violating the Google's Webmaster Guidelines [1]? [1]: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
Google is not okay with cloaking, but they will whitelist publishers if the publisher specifically includes a parameter that declares if the site requires registration or subscription. This is done in the sitemap.
https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/74288?hl=en
Re: How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
#10Doesn't this kind of also hurt SEO? I'm would guess Google has some automated system to detect and apply a negative signal to sites that provide different content to a Googlebot user agent than a non-Googlebot user agent. I guess these sites are counting that the other signals outweigh that negative hit. Otherwise, why would expertsexchange be obligated to provide the answers at the very bottom? Did something change?
I'm 99% sure I've encountered a Googlebot crawling pages with the UA of a regular browser, presumably for exactly this purpose.