Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Kasey Moore on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/20/2013).

TheSun became a subscription based site, will the change affect its ranking accross the site?

In the UK this week one of the big online news outlets - TheSun became a subscription based site similar to WSJ in the states. 

With this only the first two paragraphs of an article is being shown will this in your experience affect their rankings across the site as this is what will be shown to the search engines. 

Also do you think pay per view sites is the way to go into monetizing websites if they`re not clients? 

Hope I`ve explained my points clearly :)
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Rand Wilson: My most popular website had a 'pay per view' section that was generating a substantial income.. but a few years back i made the decision that giving away the content and monetizing the old fashioned way (via advertising) was a better way to go..
    I'm sure that some of their loyal subscribers will continue to pay but i would guess that the majority of the internet will just go somewhere else for what is likely the same information.
  • Ian Dixon: So all the content on The Sun is still free then cos they cant do an article longer than 2 paragraphs +Kasey Moore ;
    Quote from a quick Google search
    The Guardian has a reading age of 14 and the Sun has a reading age of 8
    Next they will make the Beano pay to read
  • Kasey Moore: Ha! Very good Ian. It's a shocking new outlet for sure. The top news today was for 1Direction. Pass. ;
  • Ian Dixon: Actually , on a serious note, google should address this type of thing.
    They claim to be very concerned about the user experience yet when you visit one of these paygate pages then you get frustration.
    If google has content indexed then it should either make it clear that it is an excerpt where I will have to pay to read the whole thing or it should put it in a different index
  • Dave Elliott: Annoyingly I think the Sun might get away with it :( Not cause of the pay wall or the news or anything, BUT as part of their "digital subscription bundle" you get an app that shows all the premiership football(the one where people kick a ball NOT shoulder pad rugby) as part of it as well.

    Last year I got this app for free from the good folks at espn and am missing it already :(. I mean not enough to ever buy the sun but it is annoying me.

    In terms of the bigger question I think tabloids are unlikely to get away with it, all the information they put in their "papers" is available freely online. I can see it working with higher-brow papers that actually offer opinion on the news though (like wall street journal) anyone with a twitter account can report the news, but to understand it and offer opinion, analysis and predictions is a true craft and people will in my opinion still pay for that.

    Basically, I think pay-walls could be beneficial for journalism, but the Sun, not so much.

    As for SEO questions, umm i'm not sure. You would think it would affect amounts of links and social shares that articles get. But, the big papers will have massive domain/page authority and the opening two paras of a newspaper article are pretty much perfectly optimised in terms of keywords etc and summary of article and stuff. In fact i'd argue that a lot of early on page SEO principle was copied off journalistic standards (just not the tabloid style pun headlines!)

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/20/2013).

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