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rch

OK - The 'web' search/link isn't working for me anymore. Maybe it's time to start rethinking WSJ submissions.

Based on the first paragraph, this is the exact same article:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/loan-boom-echoes-s...

View on HN

From the FAQ:

> Are paywalls ok?

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

What about sites that don't have workarounds? The workaround for WSJ no longer works.

Note that the Wall Street Journal always works for me, without subscription, through the Tor browser [1].

[1] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html

> What about sites that don't have workarounds? The workaround for WSJ no longer works.

The exception proves the rule. It's not allowed to post such stories.

It should work if you use the "web" link in an incognito window. WSJ remembers if you visited it directly and then shows the paywall even with a Google referer, but incognito mode defeats that. I agree it's getting to be something of a pain. Thankfully this article seems to be republished in many places.

Didn't work for me.

Huh. I just tried it on this article and it failed for me as well. It worked recently but they must have closed off that loophole.

Now to see if Google penalizes them. Not holding my breath.

Why should they? There's a paywall, it's no secret.

Because Google wants to provide people with useful search results, and "you can't read this article unless you pay us" is considerably less useful.

If you have a paywall, Google will still crawl and index your site, but they'll only do so based on what's available outside the paywall.

If you try to trick Google by showing Googlebot the full article but throwing up a paywall for everybody else, Google will penalize you.

Details: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en

It seems to only work for mobile now; I could not get it working from a desktop browser (with or without incognito mode), but using the web AMP link from my mobile shows me the whole article.

Incognito mode doesn't work anymore.

AMP version worked for me through the 'web' link.

Didn't work for me.

Changed within the last hour.

Even with blue-green deployments and a separate AMP solution, it's unlikely that they did a during-business-hours release just to prevent paywall workarounds for a tiny subset of their pageviews.

The WSJ is more agile than you think, and some of their devs read HN. It wouldn't surprise me at all that they built code specifically to break the workaround just for things posted to HN.

Agreed.

But by observation, it did change during that timeframe. Possibly they simply updated their AMP solution to better consistency with their non-AMP delivery, and this happened to be the effect we saw.

For lazy desktop-browser users: http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/americas-fastest-growing-loa...

They've broken that link since.

Just worked for me. Maybe because I'm blocking javascript.

For users who'd rather support a site that didn't paywall it:

http://www.realtor.com/news/trends/americas-fastest-growing-...

I think it works if I use the web link first, before trying the direct approach.

http://www.realtor.com/news/trends/americas-fastest-growing-... looks similar.

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