mrMister - 8:05 pm on Mar 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

A lot of major subscription sites do the following...

Their content is subscription based, so users can pay a subscription to see the articles. Usually a few articles are offered for free as a tempter. Sometimes the opening paragraph is offered free and users can subscribe to see the whole thing.

On each of the content pages, there is a script that only displays the full contents of each article to subscribers that are logged in (a cookie of some sort is the usual way of doing this).

If the user is not logged in then a message is displayed saying that the page is only avaliable for subscribers with links to the login page and the subscription page.

Now with this setting as it is, Google will see (and index) the non-subscribers version of the page. What you need to do is give Google a free pass. To do this, as well as the cookie detection, you also do an IP detection. If the IP address of the user is one that belongs to Google (lists of Google's IPs are available), then you treat the access as if it was a fully paged subscriber.

This way, Google will crawl and index all of the content and you will be ranked accordingly in the SERPs.

You also need to add the no-archive meta tag so that users can't access your content by looking at Google's cache.

You will not get penalised for this. Despite what some people would have you believe, as long as cloaking is not used to unfairly gain an advantage in the search engines, this kind of cloaking is fine. As long as the pages you're showing to Google are the same as what you are showing to your subscribers then you are in the clear as far as penalties are concerned. There are a number of subscription sites that do this with great success.

If you have any questions on how to do this then sticky me.