Cracking The Wall Street Journal The SEO Way

There seems to have been a big hoo-hah surrounding paid content on the web recently. The bottom line is that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like search engines offering ‘paid content’ for free. Google today seems to have given in, a little, and will now allow newspapers to limit the number of articles any one user can read.

But can I not get around this by clearing my cache and searching again?

It does seem interesting that just as some advertisers are going all out to get Google to spider their content and ensure they get more visitors from the search engines – with the advertising revenue this can bring, others seem to want a bit of everything. They allow Google to spider their content and get away with charging top dollar for people to read the content!

In fact, recent reports do indicate that News Corporation has considered turning off the Googlebot. Well, why don’t they go ahead and do that? It would be interesting to see how traffic to the Wall Street Journal would plummet. I am pretty sure that the Long Tail of search powers a healthy amount of traffic to this site every day. As Arianna Huffington said at a journalism conference yesterday:

Of course, any site can shut down the indexing of its content by Google any time it wants with a simple “disallow” in its robots.txt file. But be careful what you wish for because as soon as you do that, and start denying your content to other sites that aggregate and link back to the original source, you stand to lose a large part of your traffic overnight. But as they say in Australia: “Good on ya.”

She goes on to say that:

Thinking that removing your content from Google will somehow keep it “exclusive” shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the web and how it works.

Anyway, if you’d like to view some of this paid content, you can try the following:

• identify the URL of the article you want to read (just right click and select “copy link address”) and
• if you’re using Chrome add “cache:” before the URL or
• if you’re using another browser type in “cache:” and the website URL into  Google