In Read The Wall Street
Journal For Free, I explained how to get Wall Street Journal content for
free via Google News. But in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a problem. You
can’t find some of the articles that the Wall Street Journal publishes using
Google News, not if you look for them using their exact titles. And maybe I’m
wrong, but I kind of get the feeling the Wall Street Journal has done this to
have all the benefits of Google News traffic without people deliberately using
Google News as a way past the paid barrier.
Here’s an example.
Via Techmeme, I see this is a popular Wall Street Journal story today:
When I click through from Techmeme, I can’t see the entire article — I get
that "Free Preview" message instead. No problem. I go to Google News and search
for it by its
exact title. And when I do that, it’s nowhere to be seen — even if I
do a phrase search, where I’m ensuring that I get only pages that have all
those words in that exact order.
It should come right up. The WSJ is a Google News source, and this is the
exact title of one of its articles. Wazzup?
To find the article, I have to do something different. I have to search for
key terms that I know are in it, like this:
See that source: part? That restricts the search to the Wall Street Journal.
And the first listing that comes up is this:
Icahn Will Launch Proxy Contest To Unseat Yahoo’s Entire Board
Wall Street Journal -11
hours ago
By GREGORY ZUCKERMAN and KEVIN J. DELANEY Billionaire investor
Carl Icahn is launching a proxy contest to unseat Yahoo Inc.’s board of
directors,
Now click on that link (from Google News, if you want to see the entire
thing), and you get this as the headline:
Icahn Pushing Yahoo Back to Microsoft
See? Different headline from what Google News is listing. That means a
different headline is being fed to Google’s news search than a human sees. In
the SEO world, we call that cloaking. Except for Google News, where we call it
"First Click Free." This from Search
Engine Land explains more about that:
If I wanted to be all snarky and controversial, I’d write (over at Search
Engine Land) about how the Wall Street Journal isn’t making use of the First
Click Free program’s allowance of cloaking in the way it is supposed to be done.
That’s because to my understanding, I should as a reader see exactly the same
content that Google’s spider saw. I don’t. I see an article that has a different
headline.
Cloaking! Real cloaking, allowed by Google. That’s not what bothers me. What
upsets me is that the cloaking is being done because, from what I can tell, the
Wall Street Journal wants to play both sides of the fence. They want the free
traffic from Google, but they don’t want the hassle of figuring out how to
properly "trap"
second clicks — and they also don’t want people to "abuse" getting their free
content on Google News. So they feed out different headlines, I’m guessing.
If so, lame. In fact, the entire thing is lame — there are so many ways to
get Wall Street Journal content now for free that the pay barrier should go. And
I say this as someone who actually does pay for access. It’s just easier and
less hassle for me to get in through other methods. At the very least, let
readers of Techmeme click through without a pay barrier.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting observation, which I intend to look into in some more detail tomorrow.
There is a possible alternative explanation:
Once an article has been fed into Google News, its in! It doesn’t get re-crawled, so any subsequent changes to the article wouldn’t get picked up, unless the article was resubmitted on a new URL.
I might try a wider sample to see how things stack up.
Although Adam C. might be right it could also be possible that they have a title for search (a title for spiders) and a headline for the users (more journalistic styled). And perhaps they have chosen to provide the title instead of the headline in their Google News Sitemap (I assume they have one).
Greetings from Madrid, it is always interesting to see the sources in action.
Danny, you have got deep insight into things related to search industry. Your blog is enriching and empowering.
Check out http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~panjiabe/?page_id=21
You can read WSJ articles for free. Either enter the URL or search by title. It works by ref spoofing.