As the Google and Bing search war heats up, publishers are left wondering whether they should be putting up pay walls or keeping their articles in Google News and Google Search?

 

Well, according to Google, they can do both as the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Google has said on its blog, “There are a few ways we work with publishers to make their subscription content discoverable” as it updates one of them to remind publishers about some of their options.

The search engine giant has strict policies against what is known as cloaking – showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user.

It does this so that users aren’t deceived into clicking through to a site that’s not what they were expecting. While the anti-cloaking policies are important for users, they do create some challenges for publishers who charge for content.

Google’s “crawlers” can’t fill out a registration or payment form to see what’s behind a site’s paywall, but they need access to the information in order to index it.

One way it overcomes this is through a program called ‘First Click Free’ in which participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe.

The user’s first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on additional links on the site, the publisher can show a payment or registration request.

Google believes that First Click Free is a “great way for publishers to promote their content and for users to check out a news source before deciding whether to pay”.

In addition to First Click Free, it also crawls, indexes and treats as ‘free’ any preview pages – generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story – that are made available to users. This means that Google crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user.

Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it’s not cloaking. It then labels such stories as ‘subscription’ in Google News. The ranking of those articles are subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free. But, generally, if something has ‘subscription’ written beside it, users are less likely to click through to it.

According to Adam Bunn, Head of SEO at search marketing agency Greenlight, Google’s proposition weakens Microsoft’s hand in its struggle to improve Bing – Google’s only foreseeable challenger in the search game.

While First Click Free is designed so that newspapers can theoretically charge for their content and still benefit from Google traffic, the reality is quite different.  

“What has ensued is a ‘Mexican standoff’ in which both parties claim they have no need of the other, which in the event has been broken first by Google,” explains Bunn. “First Click Free now only requires that the first five page views by Google users on any given day are free, after which sites are free to charge whatever they like.”

At the very least though, Google has signaled its willingness to compromise its previous hard line on news content. It will help to neutralize public concern over its apparent lack of care towards publishers.

Microsoft has been reported to be discussing the possibility of exclusive deals with major newspapers including the Murdoch empire. That would see Bing become the only search engine able to include those papers in its results. If Microsoft were to get enough publishers on board, that could potentially harm Google’s relevancy.

Bunn believes that Bing’s approach may be less attractive to the publishers themselves as they see the possibility of making more cash from Google following the changes to the well established First Click Free.

“Whether these changes alone will be enough to placate newspaper owners is questionable,” says Bunn. “After all, how many Google users click through to the same site, from Google, more than times times per day?” 

Whatever the number, it’s almost certainly a tiny proportion of those who visit news sites at all. 

Furthermore, of those who do, how many are willing to pay for their news content versus the alternative option of simply reading essentially the same story elsewhere?  Again, only time will tell, and whether this will be the end or beginning of negotiations between the papers and the search engines remains to be seen.

But at the end of the day, whether you’re offering your content for free or selling it, it’s crucial that people find it.