eMember content protection and its effect on SEO

[maruf]

Hi there,

We have a website where most of our traffic is based on search engines. Our content is free, all big search engines indexed us very good. So we get a lot of visits from these search engines.

However, we are trying to create a membership community instead of keeping as it is now. That is why we bough WP eMember and we are very happy for it

I have a question though since I could not find it on the forums. If we start asking for membership from our visitors, how does it affect on the search engine results? Will the results be removed since search engines can’t access to our content?

Is there a possibility that search engines can index our content even though humans can’t access anonymously but should create an account?

Thank you for your reply in advance.

[wzp]

Webservers, technically, don’t differentiate between whether a page is being accessed by a web browser or scanned by a search engine. Therefore, any actual content that is protected from unauthorized user access, is also protected from search engine scans.

Because search engines can “see” additional things on a page that regular users can’t; it is possible to embed “hints,” called “metadata,” onto a protected page; that is visible only to search engines. This metadata substitutes for the information that is otherwise not available; without giving away or exposing the protected content.

Here is a list of Tips & Tricks HQ articles on how to use metadata (among other things) to improve your site’s SEO performance…

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/tag/seo?ap_id=TheAssurer

[nur]

Hi Maruf, just to add a few notes, Google web crawler/indexer has a feature called First Click Free (FCF). WP eMember has a feature that can utilize this first click free feature. You can use this feature to allow protected content to be indexed as it is done for normal content. So you will keep getting visitors the way you did before. but unfortunately other search engines don’t have anything similar to FCF. in this case, following WZP’s suggestion may help.

Thanks

[maruf]

Thanks guys for the reply. I enabled Google First Click Free. This is exactly what I needed

[Author]

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