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Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

This could backfire. Surely this should result in a Google penalty against Wired.com for publishing thin content?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604719?hl=en

If Wired wants the article to be exclusive on Apple News, fine, but in that case it should not be on the website. Keep it exclusively on Apple News. There is no content on this page beyond a headline.

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Google should penalize sites that do that exactly the way they are penalizing sites with banners telling visitors to get their app. If you want your content on the web and have the benefits of it being on the web (searchable, linkable, etc) put it on the web. If you want it "exclusively on Apple News", put it there. But you shouldn't get to have your cake and eat it too.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Why do you think Google is on your side, and will pull it from the results? Precedents [1] would indicate that it will appease moneyed interests, and dish out penalties in unequal terms.

[1] http://genius.com/Genius-founders-rap-genius-is-back-on-goog...

I'm not sure I agree that there's a problem here.

Time limited exclusive content on puff pieces just isnt a priority for me.

I mean, wired is given ng the content away free. I don't have a "human right" to read this.

Is it a slippery slope? Perhaps. What if real news gets walled off like this? US presidential debates being on cable only (or TV only for cord cutters) seems a bigger problem to me.

There's a lot of nuance to this issue, but I lean towards wired being fine. Though, I don't think the headline should have been displayed on the main page of non apple news devices, I don't know if it was. We all got there via a hacker news direct link.

It was listed at the top of Wired.com for regular web browsers earlier today, in their Latest News column. It now appears to have been pulled from that section, even if you click through to the archives.

The comments you are replying to were not complaining that wired chose to make the news only available via apple news.

They were complaining that they still posted the article, sans content, on the web, and suggested that should be punished for diluting web content. (they appear to have since removed that web-based article)

I think US Presidential debates are actually trending towards streaming. As I remember the last presidential debate in 2012 was on YouTube streaming and CNN recently streamed their Republican Primary debates to anyone in the US. I hope other networks follow this trend for the upcoming election season.

The way Google penalizes itself or other websites?

Google will do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10155421

So, did anyone try fetching it with an Apple News reader user-agent?

I don't know how Apple News works, but wouldn't they use a custom API to fetch news?

Apple News is basically a fancy RSS reader, with an additional private API for selected publishers.

Most of Apple News articles actually arrive via RSS, but top tier publishers (which Wired certainly is) push articles into Apple News via a private web API.

I would - but the app isn't available in the UK yet.

It should be fine if they add it to their robots.txt file.

It could alongside the other interesting exclusions: http://www.wired.com/robots.txt

Some interesting disallows there such as Disallow: /topics/Brooklyn_Police_Department. Can anyone comment on why this is?

And /topics/Advil? Wha?

That seems to pop up semi-frequently, It's basically a voluntary "right to forget" provided by the publishers.

http://f.cl.ly/items/1o2k3u2J343O3y3X290J/Image%202014-04-07...

http://harpers.org/robots.txt

https://twitter.com/waxpancake/statuses/453024948475293696

Very interesting, good to know. Thanks!

Also in there:

http://www.wired.com/2007/07/fbi-spyware-how/

While I agree that this is annoying, but how is this different from pay walls that vary from 1-2 sentences to blurred out sentences?

And what about sites that show content when the referrer is Google but show paywall otherwise?

And what about sites that show content when the referrer is Google but show paywall otherwise?

Google explicitly allows this. https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en

It should. But it hasn't yet. Right now, if I google "architect transforming NYC", this article is the first search result. Yet, when I click it, I am told to buy an Apple device and download Apple News.

Well Apple could simply be holding up Job's legacy by doing their damn best to control advertising content/revenue simply to damage Google.

There are a serious number of iOS devices out there, considering Apple's history with books, movies, and even music, who isn't to say they simply see this market as a win win, win in there is more money to be had, win in that it damages google; whom Jobs didn't like one bit for copying so much of what the iPhone brought to the table

The page will not be thin content once the exclusivity expires. Even if Google punished the page in the interim, it would not matter much, because Google drives very little of the initial traffic to articles. Social channels eclipsed it long ago. Google is more important for providing a "thick tail" of traffic after the initial social spike.

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