How to use overlays without getting a Google penalty

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period.

Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal.

Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay.

What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe?

We are considering the following approaches:

First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards.

No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty?

Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking?

I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.

[KrisRoadruck]

I would say its all a matter of implementation. Many media sites do full page ad overlays without issue. Cloaking only becomes an issue when you are showing the engines one thing and the users another. To solve this you COULD no-index (assuming you dont need the pages to be indexed) or you could simply show google the same overlay as you show the user. You could possibly even use an intermediary page.

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

Thanks. We've decided not to go down the no index route because although these pages don't have significant rankings and therefore don't drive much in the way of SEO traffic, they do contribute to the overall authority status of the site and the directories in which they sit.

For example, a hotel deal will sit within the hotels directory/sub folder so to no index all these details we fear would undermine the overall authority of this directory.

I think we are going to go with making the first paragraph visible to the users and search engines... and probably look at combining that with First Click Free