5 ms·

Penalize the site or the story? Should Google keep it out of search until it shows up on the "greater" web or are you advocating punishing the whole site becau

Penalize the site or the story? Should Google keep it out of search until it shows up on the "greater" web or are you advocating punishing the whole site because they have some content exclusively walled for a certain amount of time?

rhizome 11y ago
The whole site. The site is in the best position to know what is publicly available and which is within the walled garden and should adjust their robots.txt or spider responses to match. You pee in the pool, you have to take a time out.
- modfodder 11y ago
  The one issue I have with that thought (without putting much thought into it myself) is the conflict of interest. By punishing Wired, Google is saying that the only approved (by Google) income stream is through advertising (Google's main revenue stream) and that other types of creative partnerships may lead to websites being downlinked (and downranking past the 1st or 2nd page is almost equivalent to delisting). That line of thinking also begs the question whether only freely accessible information should come up on web searches, which would rule out any links to many professional journals which survive by subscription and/or fees per article. If you're punishing Wired for putting articles behind walled garden then it makes sense to punish all walled gardens and Google search becomes a search engine cataloging only free articles.
  - splawn 11y ago
    I see your point especially with google almost having a monopoly in web search, however I think its only fair that a site shows the same thing to humans as it does to web crawler bots, otherwise it opens up a huge can of worms and breaks search with tons of site baiting and switching.
    - modfodder 11y ago
      Yeah. I agree, there should be some signal when looking through searches what is paywall content vs what is free. I'd be for Google punishing sites that don't differentiate (at least without putting to much thought into the subject).
  - rhizome 11y ago
    Google is only transitively punishing Wired through their exclusivity agreement with Apple News, where they both decided to wall it off, not anything about creative partnerships or Google ads. Plenty of Google results come from sites that don't use Google advertising features, and walled off content can remain just so. There is certainly a discussion to be had where major sites are allowing Google to spider paywalled posts such that the content comes up in results based on hidden-to-the-rube words, but that's for another time.

rhizome 11y ago

The whole site. The site is in the best position to know what is publicly available and which is within the walled garden and should adjust their robots.txt or spider responses to match. You pee in the pool, you have to take a time out.

modfodder 11y ago
The one issue I have with that thought (without putting much thought into it myself) is the conflict of interest. By punishing Wired, Google is saying that the only approved (by Google) income stream is through advertising (Google's main revenue stream) and that other types of creative partnerships may lead to websites being downlinked (and downranking past the 1st or 2nd page is almost equivalent to delisting). That line of thinking also begs the question whether only freely accessible information should come up on web searches, which would rule out any links to many professional journals which survive by subscription and/or fees per article. If you're punishing Wired for putting articles behind walled garden then it makes sense to punish all walled gardens and Google search becomes a search engine cataloging only free articles.
- splawn 11y ago
  I see your point especially with google almost having a monopoly in web search, however I think its only fair that a site shows the same thing to humans as it does to web crawler bots, otherwise it opens up a huge can of worms and breaks search with tons of site baiting and switching.
  - modfodder 11y ago
    Yeah. I agree, there should be some signal when looking through searches what is paywall content vs what is free. I'd be for Google punishing sites that don't differentiate (at least without putting to much thought into the subject).
- rhizome 11y ago
  Google is only transitively punishing Wired through their exclusivity agreement with Apple News, where they both decided to wall it off, not anything about creative partnerships or Google ads. Plenty of Google results come from sites that don't use Google advertising features, and walled off content can remain just so. There is certainly a discussion to be had where major sites are allowing Google to spider paywalled posts such that the content comes up in results based on hidden-to-the-rube words, but that's for another time.