Forum Moderators: phranque
I have a collection of pages that are currently free for viewing to the public. They are the most popular part of our site, and they rank fairly high in Google and draw in a lot of traffic. But soon, the author of the material would like me to start charging $1 per view for these articles. The author would also like to have people register their name and stuff before looking at the articles.
It's easy enough for me to set up the payment accounts, and the logic needed to let people see them once the payment is received. No problem.
However my biggest concern was that these articles, if they're hidden behind a layer of registering & payment, will also be hidden from Google, they'll drop out of the index, no one will find them, and the whole point of charging $1 per view will be moot.
I'd like people to be drawn in by a good Google placement, then have to pay the $1 to see it. Ethical questions abound which for the time being I must ignore - I have my assignment and I must achieve it somehow.
One half-baked thought that occured to me is that I could obscure the material behind or in a DHTML layer, that would be visible to the Googlebot, but invisible to the user if they haven't paid... no, wait maybe that wouldn't work...
I'm really at a loss.
Any ideas? I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has done this or encountered the same problem before.
have you thought about having a 'preview' for each article? you won't be giving away the farm, but you can still tweak the content for google.
