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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic: When I click this article link via HN, the article gives me a paywall. Ugh. However, If I then copy and paste the article title into Google ("Snoopy Has Been Fired by MetLife"), I get the same exact link but WSJ doesn't paywall the user from Google. *smh

Is that a common practice with news sites? ...seems kind of silly to me.

EDIT: Wow, derp. I never realized the HN link labeled "web" takes you to a web search for the title of the submitted article, so that you can bypass the paywall. Thanks for the insight, everyone!

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Google penalizes sites that don't show the same content the crawler saw to to users clicking links, so if you want your content to be indexed and high in the rankings you have to give visitors from Google the full articles. Nobody else has the market power to do that, so links from all other sites lead to the paywall.

Ah, I didn't realize this was a thing. Not sure why I got downvoted by someone for asking about it, but I do appreciate you taking the time to give some more insight! ha

A recent feature of HN actually uses this trick. If you look on the comments page for any article, there's a series of links: "flag | hide | past | web" and so on. The link labeled "web" takes you to a web search for the title of the submitted article, so that you can bypass the paywall.

I agree it's very silly.

Wow, did not know that was what the web link did! Thanks for the insight! Really appreciate it.

>Slightly off topic: When I click this article link via HN, the article gives me a paywall. Ugh. However, If I then copy and paste the article title into Google ("Snoopy Has Been Fired by MetLife"), I get the same exact link but WSJ doesn't paywall the user from Google. smh*

That's what the "web" link on each entry on Hacker News does automatically: asks for the article as a Google search.

>Is that a common practice with news sites? ...seems kind of silly to me.

Well, they want to enforce their paywall, but not to send away new users coming randomly from a search.

Yes. If you click on comments first, there is a link at the top labeled "Web" that does the Google search for you.

It is common. It's how companies get to pull off their paywalls without losing their position in search results.

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