Surfing the web to find out the desired page and what if one page that looks like the desired result, but asks for a log-in? Isn’t it the most frustrating thing for a web user? I think many people don’t want to come across such a page, which asks for money in turn of providing them the information.

But, recently, Google has come up with an idea with a program called “First Click Free”, through which such pages would allow searchers to pass the registration and subscription barriers and publishers would give a free preview of their sites.

According to Google, “In order to help users find and access content that may require registration or a subscription, Google offers an option to web and news publishers called “First Click Free.” First Click Free has two main goals:

1. 1. To include highly relevant content in Google’s search index. This provides a better      experience for Google users who may not have known that content existed.
2. 2. To provide a promotion and discovery opportunity for publishers with restricted content.”

Here are the Guidelines:

“Webmasters wishing to implement First Click Free should follow these guidelines:

• All users who click a Google search result to arrive at your site should be allowed to see the full text of the content they’re trying to access.
• The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.
• If a user clicks to a multi-page article, the user must be able to view the entire article. To allow this, you could display all of the content on a single page—you would need to do this for both Googlebot and for users. Alternately, you could use cookies to make sure that a user can visit each page of a multi-page article before being asked for registration or payment.”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.