Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice

[McTaggart]

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

[Leonie-Kramer]

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

[RyanPurkey]

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!

[italiafirenze]

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?

[RyanPurkey]

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!

[italiafirenze]

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.

[RyanPurkey]

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.