Situation - You have a fitness website with a membership continuity program, such as personalized online fitness training. Membership includes access to your library of health and fitness articles and tools.
Problem – All of that great content is unavailable to search engines because a password is required in order to see it. How do you get it in the search results if the search engines can’t spider the page?
Solution – Cloaking. Yes, you heard me: Cloaking. And before anyone screams ‘blackhat’, let me remind you that many well-known, respected, high ranking websites do the same thing. Take, for instance, the Wall Street Journal.
Here is a likely example of cloaking in action from the WSJ:
Do a search without quotes for “the microsoft case chronology site:wsj.com” . Just copy and paste that query into Google, or click on the link which will take you straight to the result page. You should come up with a single result. Note that there is a relevant description for the result that is obviously not from any ‘default’ page. However, when you click on it you are asked to sign in. How would Google know what the description of that page is if it had never been allowed to view the page in the first place?
Tip: Don’t forget the nochache meta tag for these pages. It keeps Google and other search engines from showing your page on the “Cached” link under your listing in the search results, which would allow tech-savvy users to ‘cheat’ and see the content without being logged in simply by clicking on “Cached”.
Tip: What would be better than showing the same default page to non-subscribers would be to show a page that has a short ‘snippet’ from the file/page they were seeking.
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