Do "teaser" pages negatively affect me?

[lina]

My site originally was a tool to sell my book. 50% of the book is available for free on the site. Each topic is its own page, and the pages for the other 50% still have their own page, but instead of the book content it says "To read more about TOPIC" please buy the book. There are 30 pages like this.

First, I wonder if these pages negatively affect how Google views my site. Then I also wonder if this provides a bad user experience. However, I'm worried if I have all of the book available for free on the site, no one will buy it.

The site gets most of the traffic from the blog rather than the book anyway, so I want to make sure that the book stuff isn't negatively impacting my SEO. I'd appreciate any suggestions or advice. Thanks!

[Robert Charlton]

Offhand, this sounds like a setup for an extremely frustrating user experience... and yes, I can imagine it might hurt you in Google, particularly if the pages are set up like doorway pages and intended to rank.

Why have these pages at all? To offer navigation to empty pages that tell visitors to buy the book is IMO really rubbing it in... a way to make your visitors dislike you. (I've encountered something similar to this on a site that offered an entire menu of previews that were all too small to read. It amazes me that the owner couldn't figure out why he wasn't doing well in Google.)

Perhaps you could simply have a contents menu for the book that lists all topics or chapters, with the available sample chapters (or partial chapters) hyperlinked, and the others listed but not linked.

I myself wouldn't say "buy the book" in any partial preview situation. That's implicit if you set up your contents page properly. Something to the effect that the user could "preview selected chapters" should suffice. Just don't offer links that lead to dead ends.

Amazon offers previews that are I believe Ajax overlays. Usually after a fairly generous preview they indicate they're skipping some pages in the preview. This should be completely understood... and it's different from a link intended to disappoint users.

If you haven't, check out the "Look Inside" feature that appears on many of Amazon's books. I think they've got it pretty much right.

[tangor]

Teasers are an ordinary aspect of selling. Don't worry about it. If the content is compelling enough from the teaser folks will buy it. else no worries. This kind of thing has been going on as long as publishing has existed. No negative SEO, just negative from the freegie lovers ticked they didn't get it all... for free. Harlequin Romance and Scribners and Sons has been doing this for 50+ years, long before Google got involved.

[FranticFish]

I regularly come across large media sites that do this. They show the content to Google then ask humans to sign up to read it when they follow a link from the SERP to the page.

As a user I find it frustrating too, but I don't see it hurting those sites

But then they are huge, authority websites.