UK Times Pay wall effect on links?

[gavinr]

Hi all

Our PR agency has obtained a few inbound links from the UK's Times website. This is a great website with a very high DA, however they have a pay wall.

My question is does the paywall counteract the efficacy of the links into our site?

It would be good to know because if they aren't having the desired effect on rankings then I'll ask our PR agency to focus their efforts on other national newsapers.

Thanks
Gavin

[PaddyDisplays]

If google can't crawl the page the link is on then, then it does not exist to google.  End of story.

Of course you have to consider direct traffic benefit you get and with the exposure you might get some additional backlinks from other sites (that have read that story).

[gavinr]

Thanks Paddy

I guess my next question is; does a pay wall stop google from crawling a site? Does anyone know?

Thanks
Gavin

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Gavin, I don't know in this case but it shouldn't affect crawling in some cases. For example Google News sitemap could contain a tag (<access>) that tells Google that the page is only available to users with a subscription. So at least that tells them something on how the page is handled. They could still use some work around for Google News to have their pages indexed, like 'cloaking' the page for Google News bot.</access>

[PaddyDisplays]

I think that only works for the google news bot but does not work for general crawling and passing pr, But I could be wrong.

But if Martijn is correct, the question is does the uk times allow google bot allow access to that page.

A quick test would be search for a line of text from the article and see if google links to the correct page. If it does not get a hit then either google has not crawled that page yet or can't crawl the page. And if its  been a few weeks and it still can't get a hit in google search then it most likely that its not crawlable ( as is a big site you would expect a normal page to have been well crawled in that time frame)

Side note: I think it would be a good test for someone to setup a paywall page which links to a page with no other back links and see if google can pick that page up ( maybe give it anchor text of a load of jibberish and see if that page ranks for that jibberish)