End of Google First Click Free

[jharries]

Good Morning,

As you are probably aware, Google has discontinued first click free (FCF).

This is huge for us because over 50% of those that join us initially found us through FCF.

Google are encouraging all paywall sites to do two things to replace FCF:

1.) Go over to offering a fixed number of free posts per month before showing the Paywall. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7532484

2.) Use schema to indicate paywalled content.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywalled-content

This second part is particularly vital because Google is specifically warning that failing to do this could result in paywalled content that is still be shown to the google bot (as would be the case with the current FCF implementation in WP eMember) being classified as cloaking.

So, just wondering what if you have had time to give this some thought?

I also need to make clear that I understand that implementing this change really well and to googles’s satisfaction is NOT trivial and that I’m more than willing to provide some, or maybe even all, of the funding to do this since it is vital to our ongoing success.

I also think this will be the way of the future since large providers like the New York Times worked with Google to come up with this new policy.

Also, I posted it here, rather than as a custom change request, because I though others in might have thoughts to contribute.

I’m also happy to help by writing a detailed specification of how I think these changes should work.

[admin]

I will send you an email so you can reply to it and provide me more details.

[Author]

Posts