There are few things more frustrating, from a user’s perspective, than searching and finding what looks like the desired result only to click and meet a log-in page. Give us your money or all your information or go away! Personally, I usually go away, fairly confident I can find the same information elsewhere.
But if you insist on a subscription model, Google’s got an idea for a compromise. Let them scan your stuff and they’ll make it so you can give searchers one free preview of your site. They’re calling it “First Click Free for Web Search.”
If configured right, a searcher wouldn’t be able to click out to another page on the site. They could, however, if I’m reading the Webmaster Central post about this right, abuse the system a little and enter a site via search several times.
The good news is a webmaster can actively control which pages the Googlebot is allowed to scan and which ones it isn’t. That way only the content a webmaster wants to feature as a First Click Free page is the content that appears from behind the wall of registration or subscription.
The downside is, as usual when Google introduces something, the webmaster gives up a little to get a little. In this case, in order for it to work—kind of obvious it would be this way though—you have to give up to Google what one would otherwise pay or register for.
But I imagine this feature could be highly useful to many different kinds of webmasters and publishers.
