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By rastarr on
Hi All,
I just read a snippet of information about Membergate CMS over at http://www.smallbusinesswebsite.com/public/393.cfm
And it says:
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Membergate lets search engines in to the members only area to index the content there - The content gets listed for free search engine traffic but when someone clicks on the link, they need to login or subscribe as a member to your site.
THIS IS AN ABSOLUTELY HUGE ADVANTAGE.
I do not know of any other software that does this in the same manner and I have asked around. Think about how powerful that is.
Other membership sites are struggling with how to get more of their content listed with the search engines. They are trying all sorts of techniques to try to get more of their content listed without much (if any success). I know this from talking to dozens of site owners using other software. This includes some of the biggest sites online struggling with this.
Membergate does this automatically for you. You simply write your content and Membergate handles the rest.
Every single one of your pages gets listed in Google, whether it is for member's only or for the public. When people try to see a member's only page on google, they are brought to your login/signup page. This is extremely powerful and tremendously increases the amount of free search engine traffic your receive.
I can't emphasize enough how powerful and profitable that feature is. I see the results of this first hand every single day on my sites.
Do you plan on spending more and more of your money paying for traffic to your site? It certainly is nice to know that you are getting every single one of your content pages indexed by Google with Membergate.
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Maybe it's to do with their Site Wide Search:
MemberGate includes a fully automatic site wide search engine that makes it easy for visitors to search for keywords and phrases appearing in any of your active content pages. Search returns all matches, even those in the member area. But when clicked, non-members have to join to see the full pages. Separate Search engine to search discussion group posts is only available to members - thus protecting the privacy of the discussion groups.
So the question is: How do they get this done and can Drupal do the same?
Being able to get member only content indexed is an enormous bonus for websites wanting to get more traffic.
Any ideas?
Martin
Comments
Well the basic idea is going
Well the basic idea is going to be that you will allow the Googlebot user agent to be able to see all member protected content. However, as you see with the NY Times, that's not necessarily a good idea since any user could now change their user agent to googlebot and access the member area for free. You could try allowing by IP, but googlebot crawls my sites from all different IPs and subnets so I can't see IP allowing as a good solution.
I didn't look at Membergate and how they do it, but I would assume that they have done one of the above 2 options.
Also, and you might want to research this a little more, but I can see this falling under the category of "cloaking" - where Google sees different content than the normal user. I really don't know how Google treats situations like this because you see some sites get penalized and others not (NYT, Webmaster World are two examples I can think of).
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http://www.hagrin.com - Just my little slice of the Interweb
I'm no expert but in general
I'm no expert but in general I would say be very careful about dicking around with the Googlebot: it is very smart and if it thinks you are messing with it you run the risk of being googlesmacked. That will mean no more search traffic for you until several months after you fix whatever it didn't like.
Good quality explanation of your members only content will probably do you more good in the long run - and it will also make potential members more likely to sign up.
Of course, if this is a case of teaching granny to suck eggs, my apologies.
The only people 'expert' in
The only people 'expert' in any of this are the dudes that run the Googlebot. Anyone else is just guessing IMO.
I have absolutely no intention of dicking around with Google which is why I thought I'd ask whether anyone knows what these Membergate CMS people are performing They've been around for some time now and have a solid reputation of due care and diligence hence my interest. From the wording of their 'Site Wide Search' engine, I'm surmising it has something to do with this enquiry. I'd also like to do some investigation on Google's opinion.
Great to hear people's views on this though - keep them coming :)