Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Due to increasing pressure from the news publishing world, Google has revised its stance on their ‘First Click Free’ policy. According to the Google Webmaster Blog:

While we’re happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we’ve found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content. As most users are generally happy to be able to access just a few pages from these premium content providers, we’ve decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google’s Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!

Further, according to the Google News Blog, this should help keep cloaking to a minimum:

In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as “free” any preview pages – generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story – that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it’s not cloaking. We will then label such stories as “subscription” in Google News. The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free. Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it’s free. It’s simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand did an interview with Josh Cohen of Google News. According to Cohen, Google doesn’t steal content:

There are discussions saying ‘You’re stealing my content,’ but publishers have complete control on whether that content goes online in the first place. The publisher’s in complete control about the business model. If they want put up a paywall, again, publishers can put up a paywall. We don’t force you to make it free. In fact, we work with a number of publishers today who charge for content.

The other part of the extreme is even if you’re online, that doesn’t mean that we can come in and force you to index your content with us. And this is the whole robots stuff, where if you don’t want to put it in Google, or even just in Google News, you can block it, you can segment it or if you don’t want to show snippets. If you don’t want to show images, you can do that too. The publisher has complete control about whether that content is displayed.