Archive for the ‘Aggregators’ Category

Google has rolled out a new “First Click Free” plan under which news publishers may limit how much of their content is accessed through new.google.com. Users who link to a story on a paid site such as the Wall Street Journal will be able to read the whole story, but they won’t be able to link to other stories on that site. They will, however, be able to return to news.google.com up to five times a day to access stories to that site.

Here’s the official summary from Google’s Webmaster Blog. See the complete version here:

Webmasters wishing to implement First Click Free should follow these guidelines:

• All users who click a Google search result to arrive at your site should be allowed to see the full text of the content they’re trying to access.
• The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.

If a user clicks to a multi-page article, the user must be able to view the entire article. To allow this, you could display all of the content on a single page—you would need to do this for both Googlebot and for users. Alternately, you could use cookies to make sure that a user can visit each page of a multi-page article before being asked for registration or payment.