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Comment by 7373737373 | Hacker News Reader

Google should just outright delist these sites, they are incredibly annoying and worthless

Indexing flexible sampling makes no sense to me. I realize GoogleBot sees Quora differently than a human sees it, but they could easily make back end penalties. Your site loads too slowly? Organic search penalty. Broken rendering on mobile? Penalty. So why is human inaccessible content OK?

If content is blocked to me 70% of the time, shouldn’t there be a commensurate penalty? These publishers are shitting up Google results while harvesting free traffic to goose their new user acquisition numbers.

It’s the degradation of the organic Google product experience, I’ve always been baffled why they allow it.

Google has "kinda" allowed this to happen for a number of years. They used to push sites to have a "first read free" policy so that their bot can still access semi-gated content.

Now they suggest "flexible sampling" [0] to let "users" view a limited amount of content per time period.

This is a game Google has been playing for a while that goes beyond SEO and seems to really be some issue with publishers. But to be fair there are a number of instances where publishers want free access to Google's search pages and users while requesting a fee for writing the content they indexed in the first place.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...

There's a number of ways that you can expose paywalled content to Google without showing it to the user. The obvious one is paywalling content on the client side and hiding it from the user. I actually think this probably explains why client-side paywalling is so prevalent even though it's obviously far less effective. You can also serve your content in structured data that google's bots read (e.g. json+ld). I also think it's a tricky question because people often want to see authoritative sites high up in the search results even if they're paywalled, so "delisting these sites" isn't a solution that satisfies most people.

Hiding content is supposed to be against Google's stated policies.

Try searching for a news article, using the exact same title, as it's published on let's say... Breitbart. Now tell me that Google do not "hide" sites from it's users.

Google's policies explicitly differentiate between paywalled content from what they call cloaking. See the GP's link to the Google developer documentation.

They'd be staring at a bunch of lawsuits if they did that. Remember Google itself pretty much forces/nags you to login if you're on Chrome.

Why would they? Few will stop using Google over that problem, and who's to say they aren't getting paid to keep Pinterest in the results?

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