Google first click free

Recently people began to question Googles views on cloaking despite their clear guidelines as the New York Times had content ranking on Google news, which when users clicked through required a subscription. This is essentially cloaking via IP delivery and serving search engine bots a different version of content from what the public sees.

NYT was essentially a “walled garden”, however it appeared to be open in the eyes of the search engines, many people suspected unofficial agreements being made between Google and the NYT.

This may have been true at the time but since then Google launched first click free a service which allows providers of premium news content to have their content indexed and ranked within Google News whilst only providing excerpts of the full articles to surfers, requesting for a subscription fee to continue reading.

This is great news for publishers who rely on advertising/subscription driven business models as having “first click free” traffic will ensure consistent revenue is generated from new content and strategic placement of calls to sale at the end of article excerpts will help to drive paid subscriptions.

Another reason why this is a win for publishers is that publishers have been known to use paid search advertising to drive traffic and increase page impressions and ad impressions through targeting the search “long tail” and buying as much inventory on low CPC’s as possible. As Google tighten their paid search guidelines through the quality score system it will become harder for affiliates and publishers to make revenues via arbitraging traffic.

“First click free” will hopefully counteract the growing stringencies of paid search advertising for publishers at least.