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That makes sense. I am looking into whether any portion of our content can be made public in a way that would still comply with industry regulations. I am betting against it.

Does anyone know whether a page requiring login like this could feasibly rank with a strong backlink profile or a lot of quality social mentions?

Should have read the target:

"Subscription designation, snippets only: If First Click Free isn't a feasible option for you, we will display the "subscription" tag next to the publication name of all sources that greet our users with a subscription or registration form. This signals to our users that they may be required to register or subscribe on your site in order to access the article. This setting will only apply to Google News results.

If you prefer this option, please display a snippet of your article that is at least 80 words long and includes either an excerpt or a summary of the specific article. Since we do not permit "cloaking" -- the practice of showing Googlebot a full version of your article while showing users the subscription or registration version -- we will only crawl and display your content based on the article snippets you provide. If you currently cloak for Googlebot-news but not for Googlebot, you do not need to make any changes; Google News crawls with Googlebot and automatically uses the 80-word snippet.

NOTE: If you cloak for Googlebot, your site may be subject to Google Webmaster penalties. Please review Webmaster Guidelines to learn about best practices."

"In order to successfully crawl your site, Google needs to be able to crawl your content without filling out a registration form. The easiest way to do this is to configure your webservers not to serve the registration page to our crawlers (when the user-agent is "Googlebot") so that Googlebot can crawl these pages successfully. You can choose to allow Googlebot access to some restricted pages but not others. More information about technical requirements."

-http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536

Any harm in doing this while not implementing the rest of First Click Free??

What would you guys think about programming the login requirement behavior in such a way that only Google can't execute it--so Google wouldn't know that it is the only one getting through?

Not sure whether this is technically possible, but if it were, would it be theoretically likely to incur a penalty? Or is it foolish for other reasons?

My plan: 3 sites with identical content, yet--wait for it--for every article whose topic is A, the pages on all three sites posting that article will have a rel=canonical tag pointing to Site A. For every article whose topic is B, the pages on all three sites posting that article will have a rel=canonical tag pointing to Site B.

So Site A will have some articles about topics A, B, and C. And for pages with articles about A, the rel=canonical will point to the page it's on. Yet for pages with articles about B, the rel=canonical will point to the version of that article on site B. Etc.

I have my reasons for planning this, but you can see more or less that I want each site to rank for its niche, yet I want the users at each site to have access to the full spectrum of articles in the shared articles database without having to leave a given site.

These would be distinct brands with distinct Whois, directory listings, etc. etc.

The content is quality and unique to our company.

Is this a real thing?

Good idea--I'll have to determine precisely what I can and cannot show publicly and see if there isn't something I can do to leverage that.

I've heard about staying away from agent-specific content, but I wonder what the data are and whether there are any successful attempts?

First click free unfortunately won't work for us.

How might I go about determining how adult content sites handle this issue?

Understood. The login requirement is necessary for compliance with industry regulations. My questions is whether I will be penalized for serving agent-specific content and/or whether there is a better way to get these pages in the index.

Somehow certain newspapers' webpages show up in the index but require login. My client has a whole section of the site that requires a login (registration is free), and we'd love to get that content indexed. The developer offered to remove the login requirement for specific user agents (eg Googlebot, et al.). I am afraid this might get us penalized.

Any insight?

Didn't see this post. Interesting.

It depends on what you are using the rel canonical for. In our case we were changing domains entirely and I could not 301 the old URLs to the new (both domains located the same content), so I really needed the rel canonicals to work. In the long run I figured out 1. how to 301 the old URLs and 2. how to update the rel canonical on the homepage of the Wix site. All the pages on the Wix site I was working with were dynamic, so they didn't have unique, static URLs. Between the domain change, the 301s, the one rel canonical I was able to update, a little bit of extra keyword rich text on the home page, some directory submittals, and a handful of links, I was able to get a few #1 rankings, as well as some top 3 and top 10 rankings for keywords among those we were targeting. The client was on a budget so the targets weren't too ambitious, and we didn't have the resources to overhaul the site entirely. Also for some reason they were emotionally committed to hosting and managing their site via WIX. It turned out ok given their budget and goals.

Ceteris paribus, if you have a choice, and inbound traffic matters to you, you ought to stay away from Wix. The convenience Wix offers can be had without paying for it with the lack of flexibility and control tech-minded inbound marketers value.

Have you tried WordTracker? They offer "Search Count":

“Search Count (new tool):
For the Wordtracker data, the Search count is the number of times each keyword appears in our database of searches over the past 365 days. This constitutes just under 1% of all US search, and the data is gathered from metacrawler.com and dogpile.com.

The database is updated every day, and new data is between 15 and 30 hours old when it hits the live servers. If you’re searching using the Google data, the information presented is from the Google AdWords API. It’s Exact Match data by default, and the search volumes are from the last available month (in real terms this normally means the last calendar month).

There’s currently no indication from Google about their sample size for this data, or what kind of extrapolation may be applied to the data before it’s presented. There is a limit of 1,000 searches per month on the Google data – this is to ensure we can give an even service to all of our users.”

-https://keywords.wordtracker.com/help/metrics_explained

They offer a pretty good tutorial on how to use their tool to find profitable niches: http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/finding-profitable-keywords-just-got-easier

You can get the basic "WordTracker Count" (WT) metric for free from several different tools online, SEOBook.com's Keyword Tool among them: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ 

Thanks. Figured out a workaround.

I've got a client with a Wix site and I need to edit their rel canonical tags--does anyone on here happen to know whether that's possible?

This was recently mentioned on another Q&A post; you'll want to check it out. You may not get "credit" for the backlinks to your competitors domain, depending on the situation.

I assume since it is from a competitor it topically related to your site? Why not figure out which specific URLs on the domain have the most backlinks and 301 them over to URLs on your domain with highly similar content? If you lack the content, write fresh content and pass it through the LDA tool a couple times to make sure it's highly relevant for your closest related KW target. 301 all other links to your homepage or something.

If the site has a lot of standalone merit, why not just capitalize on it and treat it like an independent lead or revenue source? Maybe put some well-placed links to your existing site throughout?

Anybody know of one?

Yes, Xenu Link Sleuth is supposed to be able do this. Here is a helpful post that includes a section on redirects.

It looks like the Yahoo Site Explorer and Open Site Explorer also report the 301s they are aware of as backlinks.

I'd love for someone else on here to confirm.

Like you I've also seen 301's significantly positively impact rankings.

Good luck with your research!

Thanks Keri; looks awesome.