google and "subscription is required" articles

today, i did a google search and found an article I might like to read. clicked and found that to read the article i need to subscribe.

I saw the same thing in a well known webmaster forum.

So, my guess is that site shows all the content for google bot and a subscribe notice for all the users. It seems to me that site is fooling google, dont you think?

I Hope google does not allows this

 

Yeah, that's cloaking of a sort and Google'll find out and prolly deindex them.

 

There was quite a debate regarding this very thing at SEW.

Cloaking as defined by Wiki is...

The New York Times does this very thing and the concensus is that no, it is not cloaking because ultimately the user is served the very same content the bots are.

It was quite an interesting debate. There's a link to it HERE on my blog.

Dave

 

Google won't ban a site for that type of cloaking. At least TODAY they won't. Who knows what they'll do tomorrow? Large corporate (and very popular) sites have almost complete immunity to cloaking bans anyway.

 

some weeks ago (2 or 3) did a google search and found some links from webmasterworld, at least 2 of those links were from proteted pass pages (login required) - a private forum or something like.