By parrottvision on

I have search Google and Drupal high and low and cannot find anything on this. Is there a way to give Google and other search engines access to authenticated user content? So the content can be crawled and indexed but visitors have to sign up to get to the content?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

purrin’s picture

purrin commented

I really can't imagine an /easy/ way to do this. Blackhat SEO's a lot of times have super-optimized versions of sites that are passed off to spiders whenever they make requests, but it's quite a pain the back-end.. and with a site with regularly generated content it would be a major pain, to be sure. I'd be interested in reading about a possible solution to this if someone has one.

prbass’s picture

prbass commented

The short answer is no... if you want google to index it, it has to be available to unauthenticated users.

Why not try making a short version of your node public, (use nodeaccess) and link to a separate longer node available to registered users only

The only other way to do this is to be underhanded and sneaky, and the solution is far from perfect. It is also clearly against google's quality guidelines, but some people seem to get away with it...

See for example: http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/2007/07/30/experts-exchange-should-be-rem...

They hide content with CSS / obfuscation etc, and they trick people into thinking it is not publicly viewable.

You need to bear in mind that if it is indexed by google, it's in their cache, so anyone can read it anyway. You can also read the content by turning off the CSS, viewing the source, etc.

parrottvision’s picture

parrottvision commented

some great ideas - thanks folks. Really appreciate it. We are just trying to encourage our users to sign up. There is nothing dodgy going on. But that rustyblade write up was great and started me thinking.