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Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

Every site that presents content to search indexing bots, but requires a signup by actual users should be shunned into irrelevancy on the spot. This seems like such shitty behavior that the response to nuke from orbit seems like a no-brainer, I'm not sure why it isn't the default.

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They should be shunned by Google itself. Search engines have an actual rule against this. Apparently it's called cloaking: feeding bots one page and users another. It obviously leads to unhappy users who expected one thing and got another.

Google doesn't care anymore.

I thought Google already had a rule about something like this, that they'd delist your site entirely for breaking. I wonder whether there's a loophole, or if they're just choosing to look the other way here.

Google doesn’t apply its rules to the big players; they generate a lot of ad revenue.

I’m curious as to why Google accommodates Pinterest - as far as I know they run their own ads and don’t use Google’s ad network, so I’m not sure what benefit Google gets?

You're probably thinking of the "First Click Free" program, which was intended mainly for news sites, and required those sites to present users with the full content of an article if they arrived on it by clicking on a Google result. This prevented sites from hitting users with a paywall/signup page immediately.

Sadly, Google weakened this principle in 2015 and abandoned it entirely in 2017:

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2015/09/first-clic...

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...

I don't know. This is a difficult balance. If I'm searching for some information I would rather know that it exists behind a paywall and that I can have it if I pay, than not know that it exists at all. As a consumer I want the choice.

Needs a switch like "Avoid tolls" in Maps

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