What if you serve GoogleBot one title tag and GoogleBot Mobile a different title tags/attributes? Google's John Mueller said that Google would likely just ignore it, or maybe just pick one? Here are the tweets:
GoogleBot for mobile and desktop are very similar these days and when Google goes full-on with the mobile first index then things will flip. So make sure not to try to play games with Google here, espesially now.
With no surprise, Google has announced they are moving away from the first click free program, which is how Google handled paywalled content in search for a decade with what they are calling "flexible sampling."
Flexible sampling is offered in two formats, either metering or lead-in formats. Metering provides users with a quota of free articles to consume, after which paywalls will start appearing. Lead-in offers a portion of an article’s content without it being shown in full.
This FCF and now flexible sampling is all about making sure spammers don't use cloaking techniques. So to help with this, Google is asking publishers who use these methods to also markup their content with new structured data for paywalled content. The documentation is pretty clear and how it works, and it seems pretty simple to use, so look into it. Although, it seems not to work yet with the Structured data testing tool:
Greg Sterling wrote up some more of the backstory on this for the business reasons.
Here is what Google wrote about metered content:
In general, we think that monthly, rather than daily metering provides more flexibility and a safer environment for testing. The user impact of changing from one integer value to the next is less significant at, say, 10 monthly samples than at 3 daily samples. Monthly metering also has the advantage of focusing paywall hits on your most engaged users, who are those most likely to subscribe, while allowing your newer and less engaged users to become acquainted with the value of your content before experiencing a paywall. (“Paywall,” in this context, applies equally to barriers that require either subscription or merely registration for content access.)
Here is what Google wrote about lead-in content:
Some publishers show the first few sentences of an article “above the fold” of their paywall. We think this is a good practice. By exposing the article lede, publishers can let users experience the value of the content and so provide more value to the user than a page with completely blocked content. Lead-in also generates user curiosity about how article continues, which may assist in conversion.
Here is a photo I found on Instagram of an airplane, well, a small one, inside the Google office in Warsaw. This was posted by marzi on the social network who wrote "what about your work environment?"
What about it?
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
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Most online news publications are not able to support themselves these days with advertising. For this reason, among others, Google is yielding to publisher requests and replacing its much-debated “First Click Free” program with what it calls “Flexible Sampling.”
Content and news publishers will now control whether and how many articles they want to let searchers access before showing a paywall or subscription prompt. The company is also working on an array of other tools to help boost publisher subscriptions.
End of First Click Free
Google’s VP for News, Richard Gingras, told me last week that the company has been collaborating with publishers and testing the new approach with the New York Times and the Financial Times specifically. But despite allowing publishers greater flexibility, Google is still recommending (but not enforcing) that publishers make some content available for free in search results:
Based on our investigations, we have created detailed best practices for implementing flexible sampling. There are two types of sampling we advise: metering, which provides users with a quota of free articles to consume, after which paywalls will start appearing; and lead-in, which offers a portion of an article’s content without it being shown in full.
Publishers will not be required to provide free content to be indexed. Gingras said that Google will be crawling full articles behind the wall for indexing but that publisher decisions about how much content to sample to search users will not impact rankings in any way.
Subscription Optimization
Gingras said that Google is going to use ad targeting tactics to identify which audiences are most likely to subscribe. He said that publishers would need to share their audience profiles and Google would then seek out lookalike audiences to maximize subscriber signups.
He added that different offers and content might be shown to different audiences based on a “propensity to pay” or subscribe. Google will be using its machine learning and other capabilities to find the right audiences, based on publisher data. Publishers will be able to adjust the presentation of content and offers according to different sub-segments or profiles.
Subscription optimization won’t become available until next year, however. When I asked if this was going to be a formal ad product — given that it uses ad targeting technology and approaches — Gingras said that it might become one, but that Google was right now “just trying to understand costs and value delivered.”
Removing Purchase Friction
Google also wants to make it much easier for users to subscribe to publisher content. Gingras cited improved checkout and purchase flows and one-click payments as Google aspirations for publishers. “We’d like to get the purchase process down to one click.”
The company is building a standard or template-based checkout flow that it’s going to make available to publishers at their discretion. Publishers will be free to ignore it, adopt it or modify it.
Gingras told me that where the user is a Google account holder, the company can pre-populate many of the fields and accelerate checkout. And in cases where there’s a payment card on file with Google it can enable one-click subscriptions. In real time, the publisher will query Google to determine what category the user falls into and deliver the right message accordingly.
This attention to improving the subscription experience is especially important on mobile. Pew Research Center data show that 85 percent of US adults access news on mobile devices.
Gingras said that Google wasn’t going to take fees or a revenue share for transactions it delivers or facilitates. He asserted that the company doesn’t want to own the user and that all data would be turned over to publishers.
Showing Pubs You Subscribe To
Gingras concluded by teasing that Google will more prominently expose content from publications users already subscribe to, which will be given a one-box like treatment above the fold or at the top of the page. Organic results will not change or be impacted.
It may go something like this: if I already subscribe to the New York Times and perform a search on the Catalan independence referendum in Spain, the Times article will be prominently presented to me vs. other publications I don’t subscribe to, in a carousel or one-box.
Gingras also emphasized several times that Google is sincere about helping publishers generate more subscriber revenue and wants to be a supportive partner. New publishers have in years past been ambivalent or antagonistic toward Google.
Not all of these programs are available right away. First Click Free is being replaced by flexible sampling immediately. But some of the other tools in Google’s new publisher friendly toolkit won’t appear until next year.
About The Author
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,
, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on
Web server log files can yield a wealth of valuable information for the savvy SEO.
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Stone Temple’s Eric Enge explains why log files are so valuable for SEO analysis.
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
Mark: Say, I’m a site owner and I’ve done all the basic tasks of an SEO audit. Is there anything people commonly overlook?
Eric: Well, often in my experience, Mark, site owners neglect to check their log files on a regular basis.
Mark: Their log files?
What Is a Log File?
Eric: A log file is a record maintained on most web servers that records all the incoming activity from humans, bots, and anything else that might have access to or even attempt to access your site. What’s particularly valuable about those logs for SEO purposes is the fact that they record every visit from a search engine to your site.
Mark: And you can learn valuable things from that?
Eric: Oh, yes. For example, over time, you can spot patterns of search engine crawler behavior on your site. Is a crawler’s visiting frequency tending up or down? Each could be communicating a message about how that search engine views your site.
Mark: Well, that’s interesting because that’s something you can’t see in your analytics, right?
Eric: That’s right. Another thing you can’t do in your analytics is go back in time any further than before when you installed the analytics in the first place. So, in contrast, with log files you can go back to the beginning of the site time since you set it up, provided that your server host preserves log files. And most do. And if they don’t, you can ask them to do that for you.
Mark: Good. Well, that sounds handy for investigating problems that might have been building up over a long time. Does log file analysis have any other benefits for SEO?
Eric: Sure. For one thing, it’s not a drag on page speed like JavaScript for analytics can be. And you don’t have to worry about messing it up by applying the code incorrectly.
Mark: Okay, well those are some of the advantages of log files. Now let’s get specific about what we can discover by using them.
What Can SEOs Discover in a Log File?
Eric: There are a number of useful things you can find out by examining your log files. One is knowing when and how often crawlers access your site. Of course, that means you can also see who might be trying to scrape your site or identify possible DOS, or denial of service, malicious attacks.
Mark: Well, what about the issue of crawl budget and priority?
Eric: Ah, yes. Search engine crawlers will only crawl so much of a site on any given day. We call how much effort they will give to a particular site its crawl budget. Knowing that, you want to direct as much as possible of that crawl budget to the pages that are highest priority for you to make sure that search crawlers are getting to your most important pages first and most often. Your log files help you determine all of this. And then, there are things you could do to redirect crawl priority to where you want it.
Mark: To learn more about how to do that and about some other uses of log file analysis, see Eric’s in-depth article on the topic on our blog. We’ll give you a link in the episode notes.
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
Journalism provides accurate and timely information when it matters most, shaping our understanding of important issues and pushing us to learn more in search of the truth. People come to Google looking for high-quality content, and our job is to help them find it. However, sometimes that content is behind a paywall.
While research has shown that people are becoming more accustomed to paying for news, the sometimes painful process of signing up for a subscription can be a turn off. That’s not great for users or for news publishers who see subscriptions as an increasingly important source of revenue.
To address these problems we’ve been talking to news publishers about how to support their subscription businesses with a focus on the following:
First, Flexible Sampling will replace First Click Free. Publishers are in the best position to determine what level of free sampling works best for them. So as of this week, we are ending the First Click Free policy, which required publishers to provide a minimum of three free articles per day via Google Search and Google News before people were shown a paywall.
Longer term, we are building a suite of products and services to help news publishers reach new audiences, drive subscriptions and grow revenue.
We are also looking at how we can simplify the purchase process and make it easy for Google users to get the full value of their subscriptions across Google’s platforms.
Our goal is to make subscriptions work seamlessly everywhere, for everyone.
First Click Free
We will end our First Click Free policy in favor of a Flexible Sampling model where publishers will decide how many, if any, free articles they want to provide to potential subscribers based on their own business strategies. This move is informed by our own research, publisher feedback, and months-long experiments with the New York Times and the Financial Times, bothof which operate successful subscription services.
"Google's decision to let publishers determine how much content readers can sample from search is a positive development,” said Kinsey Wilson, an adviser to New York Times CEO Mark Thompson. "We're encouraged as well by Google's willingness to consider other ways of supporting subscription business models and we are looking forward to continuing to work with them to craft smart solutions."
Publishers generally recognize that giving people access to some free content is the way to persuade people to buy their product. The typical approach to sampling is a model called metering, which lets people see a pre-determined number of free stories before a paywall kicks in. We recommend the following approach:
Monthly, rather than daily, metering allows publishers more flexibility to experiment with the number of free stories to offer people and to target those more likely to subscribe.
For most publishers, 10 articles per month is a good starting point.
“Try before you buy” underlines what many publishers already know—they need to provide some form of free sampling to be successful on the internet. If it’s too little, then fewer users will click on links to that content or share it, which could have an effect on brand discovery and subsequently may affect traffic over time.
Subscription support
Subscribing to great content should not be as hard as it is today. Registering on a site, creating and remembering multiple passwords, and entering credit card information—these are all hassles we hope to solve.
As a first step we’re taking advantage of our existing identity and payment technologies to help people subscribe on a publication’s website with a single click, and then seamlessly access that content anywhere— whether it’s on that publisher site or mobile app, or on Google Newsstand, Google Search or Google News.
And since news products and subscription models vary widely, we’re collaborating with publishers around the world on how to build a subscription mechanism that can meet the needs of a diverse array of approaches—to the benefit of the news industry and consumers alike.
We’re also exploring how Google’s machine learning capabilities can help publishers recognize potential subscribers and present the right offer to the right audience at the right time.
“It's extremely clear that advertising alone can no longer pay for the production and distribution of high quality journalism—and at the same time the societal need for sustainable independent journalism has never been greater. Reader-based revenue, aka paid-content, or subscription services, are therefore not just a nice-to-have, but an essential component of a publisher's revenue composition,” said Jon Slade, FT Chief Commercial Officer.
“The Financial Times is welcoming of Google's input and actions to help this critical sector of the media industry, and we've worked very closely with Google to aid understanding of the needs that publishers have and how Google can help. That mutual understanding includes the ability to set controls over the amount of free content given to readers, a level playing field for content discovery, optimised promotion and payment processes. It is important that we now build and accelerate on the discussions and actions to date.”
We are just getting started and want to get as much input from publishers—large, small, national, local, international—to make sure we build solutions together that work for everyone.
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In Google’s mission to organize the world's information, we want to guide Google users to the highest quality content, the principle exemplified in our quality rater guidelines. Professional publishers provide the lion’s share of quality content that benefits users and we want to encourage their success.
The ecosystem is sustained via two main sources of revenue: ads and subscriptions, with the latter requiring a delicate balance to be effective in Search. Typically subscription content is hidden behind paywalls, so that users who don’t have a subscription don’t have access. Our evaluations have shown that users who are not familiar with the high quality content behind a paywall often turn to other sites offering free content. It is difficult to justify a subscription if one doesn't already know how valuable the content is, and in fact, our experiments have shown that a portion of users shy away from subscription sites. Therefore, it is essential that sites provide some amount of free sampling of their content so that users can learn how valuable their content is.
The First Click Free (FCF) policy for both Google web search and News was designed to address this issue. It offers promotion and discovery opportunities for publishers with subscription content, while giving Google users an opportunity to discover that content. Over the past year, we have worked with publishers to investigate the effects of FCF on user satisfaction and on the sustainability of the publishing ecosystem. We found that while FCF is a reasonable sampling model, publishers are in a better position to determine what specific sampling strategy works best for them. Therefore, we are removing FCF as a requirement for Search, and we encourage publishers to experiment with different free sampling schemes, as long as they stay within the updated webmaster guidelines. We call this Flexible Sampling.
One of the original motivations for FCF is to address the issues surrounding cloaking, where the content served to Googlebot is different from the content served to users. Spammers often seek to game search engines by showing interesting content to the search engine, say healthy food recipes, but then showing users an offer for diet pills. This “bait and switch” scheme creates a bad user experience since users do not get the content they expected. Sites with paywalls are strongly encouraged to apply the new structured data to their pages, because without it, the paywall may be interpreted as a form of cloaking, and the pages would then be removed from search results.
Based on our investigations, we have created detailed best practices for implementing flexible sampling. There are two types of sampling we advise: metering, which provides users with a quota of free articles to consume, after which paywalls will start appearing; and lead-in, which offers a portion of an article’s content without it being shown in full.
For metering, we think that monthly (rather than daily) metering provides more flexibility and a safer environment for testing. The user impact of changing from one integer value to the next is less significant at, say, 10 monthly samples than at 3 daily samples. All publishers and their audiences are different, so there is no single value for optimal free sampling across publishers. However, we recommend that publishers start by providing 10 free clicks per month to Google search users in order to preserve a good user experience for new potential subscribers. Publishers should then experiment to optimize the tradeoff between discovery and conversion that works best for their businesses.
Lead-in is generally implemented as truncated content, such as the first few sentences or 50-100 words of the article. Lead-in allows users a taste of how valuable the content may be. Compared to a page with completely blocked content, lead-in clearly provides more utility and added value to users.
We are excited by this change as it allows the growth of the premium content ecosystem, which ultimately benefits users. We look forward to the prospect of serving users more high quality content!
Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Engineer
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