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
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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?
-
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!
-
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
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.
Related Questions
-
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices
Hi, We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product. All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/ Is this the best practice? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?
I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently. I'm debating the following options, which one is better? Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
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 | | RickyShockley1 -
What is the best way to optimize/setup a teaser "coming soon" page for a new product launch?
Within the context of a physical product launch what are some ideas around creating a /coming-soon page that "teases" the launch. Ideally I'd like to optimize a page around the product, but the client wants to try build consumer anticipation without giving too many details away. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSI0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Domain Name Change - Best Practices?
Good day guys, We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain. However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website). It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties. Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0