Google First Click Free work with shortocde protected content?

[jcopp]

Does Google First Click free work with content that is posted behind membership shortcodes (not full page restriction)?

E.g. is there a way to set the membership level of the first page view (or something similar)?

Thanks,

John

[admin]

Yes, the Google first click feature should work for content protected using partial/section protection shortcodes.

Not sure what you mean by the following:

there a way to set the membership level of the first page view

Google’s policy dictates that if you are using first click free, the user be allowed to see everything when they come to your site from a Google search result.

[jcopp]

Great, thanks for the info!

Is there any way to turn it off just for certain pages?

[wpCommerce]

Hi, Everything about this feature is explained in here:

How to Use Google First Click Free Feature with Your Membership Site

You should use the feature as it is implemented otherwise Google can penalize the site if you tweak it to work how you want (we want to make sure it does exactly what Google wants as far as the first click free feature goes).

[Prateek]

Hi… if I have chosen the Google First click free option for my blog and have two buttons for Digital products purchase – at difference price points; one button for all non-members/visitors and a second only for members….

The second button is obviously protected using partial/section protection code… and is not visible to non-members or visitors from SERPs… would doing so, be tatamount to violation of Google’s TOS ?

[admin]

Prateek, you are not doing anything wrong in terms of your setup.

[rhodian]

Hi,

All of my site’s pages are unprotected, ‘premium’ content however which is video (stored on Amazon S3 and accessed using encrypted URLs which expire within 3 minutes of page loading) is protected with the ‘[emember_protected for=’ shortcode. This has been done to entice users into subscribing.

We have a lot of Google traffic, even though we have not launched yet… we are fortunate in that we come up first page for a lot of our expected search results!

The ‘Google First Click Free’ option has been enabled and I noticed that more of the videos are being played than I would’ve expected given that and our premium membership (we also have free subscribed members and guests accessing site) is nearly non existent!

Could it be that the Google visitors are seeing the video player and clicking play even though it is protected with the shortcode?

Can you explain exactly what is protected and what is not when the ‘Google First Click Free’ is enabled?

If ‘Google First Click Free’ is not the culprit, how can users view protected content (and press play)?

Thanks…

[wzp]

What search terms bring up your results? Do the results include video player links?

When you use the “Google First Click Free” feature, you are required to show the user everything on that page when they come to that page from the search engine (you cannot have any content that is hidden on that page otherwise you will be violating their rules).

[rhodian]

Hi wzp,

You can use ‘alexi petroulias kickboxing’ and you will find our site has the first 7 entries (fightsports-ondemand.tv). As for whether we are hiding anything that Google is seeing, no that is not the case.

Are you aware of anyway that content hidden using the shortcode is visible to non authorised users?

Regards

rhodian

[wzp]

When I use the Google video search terms “alexi petroulias kickboxing” the results will show a frame capture of what’s supposed to be a video clip, but actually clicking on a search result renders a page in which the video is protected.

Simply clicking on the link does not cause the protected videos to be playable. Perhaps the traffic you are seeing is just the Google spider crawling over your site; in order to obtain the frame capture. This can be determined through the use of Google Analytics; to see the IP addresses of page visitors.

[rhodian]

Thanks…. I’ll investigate the matter some more!

[Author]

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