Monday, October 02, 2017<\/p>\n
\n In Google’s \n The ecosystem is sustained via two main sources of revenue: ads and subscriptions, with the latter \n The First Click Free (FCF)<\/span> policy for both Google \n One of the original motivations for FCF is to address the issues surrounding
\n mission<\/a>
\n to organize the world’s information, we want to guide Google users to the highest quality content,
\n the principle exemplified in our
\n quality rater guidelines<\/a>.
\n Professional publishers provide the lion’s share of quality content that benefits users and we
\n want to encourage their success.\n<\/p>\n
\n requiring a delicate balance to be effective in Search. Typically subscription content is hidden
\n behind paywalls, so that users who don’t have a subscription don’t have access. Our evaluations
\n have shown that users who are not familiar with the high quality content behind a paywall often
\n turn to other sites that are offering content without a subscription or login. It is difficult to
\n justify a subscription if one doesn’t already know how valuable the content is, and in fact, our
\n experiments have shown that a portion of users shy away from subscription sites. Therefore, it is
\n essential that sites provide some amount of sampling of their content so that users can learn how
\n valuable their content is.\n<\/p>\n
\n web search<\/a> and
\n News<\/a>
\n was designed to address this issue. It offers promotion and discovery opportunities for publishers
\n with subscription content, while giving Google users an opportunity to discover that content. Over
\n the past year, we have worked with publishers to investigate the effects of FCF on user
\n satisfaction and on the sustainability of the publishing ecosystem. We found that while FCF is a
\n reasonable sampling model, publishers are in a better position to determine what specific sampling
\n strategy works best for them. Therefore, we are removing FCF as a requirement for Search, and we
\n encourage publishers to experiment with different sampling schemes, as long as they stay within
\n the updated
\n webmaster guidelines<\/a>. We call
\n this Flexible Sampling<\/b>.\n<\/p>\n
\n cloaking<\/a>, where the content served to
\n Googlebot is different from the content served to users. Spammers often seek to game search
\n engines by showing interesting content to the search engine, say healthy food recipes, but then
\n showing users an offer for diet pills. This “bait and switch” scheme creates a bad user experience
\n since users do not get the content they expected. Sites with paywalls are strongly encouraged to
\n apply the new
\n structured data<\/a>
\n to their pages, because without it, the paywall may be interpreted as a form of cloaking, and the
\n pages would then be removed from search results.\n<\/p>\n