Google allows publishers to limit free news access

The recent wave of discussions among media companies and publishers on how to charge for content on their websites, has led to Google modifying its First Click Free service to allow users to view the first five pages of a subscription-only website. After this they are likely to be forwarded to a subscription or payment page. The pages concerned will be labeled in Google News as "subscription"

This latest change from Google follows claims from Rupert Murdoch, that the search engine is profiting from online news provided by newspaper groups. Murdoch has recently been threatening to make the content of The Times and Sun websites subscription-only and to exclude Google from crawling the sites, a move which most internet marketing guru’s consider is suicidal as the vast majority of visitors to The Times website currently come via Google.

From an SEO perspective, making a website subscription-only can only do harm to the website's rankings, it certainly can't improve them.

Josh Cohen, Google's senior business product manager put some people's minds at rest by saying, "The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free," but then ominously added. "Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it."

Cohen is quite rightly suggesting that the number of inbound links for a subscription-only website will be lower due to the lack of access to the site. The Times may have the best news content on the web but if only a select few have access to it, then visitor numbers, search engine rankings and advertising revenues will ultimately fall.

So 'First Click Free' is an inspired move by Google, keeping news providers and users happy, whilst simultaneously avoiding a mass exodus of content from the Google index.