Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content

Google has made a change to the way it treats its "first click free" option for publishers. The option was designed for legitimate publishers to get around Google's cloaking policies, which discourage the showing of one web page to a crawler while the user sees something different.

With the policy, Google users have been able to access one article from a publication that has a pay wall in place, but are then unable to access other content via links on the site without registering. However, users have been able to get around this in the past, simply by searching for the desired piece of content and starting over from Google.

Now Google has implemented a change that will only allow users to view five pages of content from such a source in a 24 hour period. In a post today on the Google News Blog, Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen explains, "If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day. We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis."

"In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as 'free' any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us," Cohen notes. "This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking."

Google would label stories like this as "subscription" when indexed in Google News. According to Cohen, they would rank based on the same criteria as other sites (paid or free).

He points out that paid content may not rank as well, simply because of the popularity of the content. Less people are likely to link to content that requires a subscription to read, particularly if there is a similar piece of content that is available for free. Google has always favored links and it would be not different in this case.

Have You Read This?

> Obvious: People Don't Want to Pay for Online News

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> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?

By Tweeting, You Could Appear All Over the Web

Twitter has introduced a new widget for the Lists feature. If you are unfamiliar with Twitter's widgets, there is one that lets you display your most recent Twitter updates on a web page, one that lets you display search results in real time, and one that lets you show off your favorite tweets.

The Lists Widget is fully customizable. You start off by selecting the username of the account you want to pull lists from, then choose the list name, title it, and give it a caption.

Then you can set your preferences for things like polling for new results, including a scrollbar, if you want it to run on a timed interval or load all tweets, how many tweets you want it to show, and whether or not you want it to show avatars, timestamps, and hashtags.

Then you can customize the colors of the shell background, the shell text, the tweet background, the tweet text, and the links. You can also adjust the dimensions of the widget or simply set it to auto width.

Once you are done personalizing the widget, you just grab the code and stick it on your site or blog. Now you're sharing the lists you think are great with the rest of the world.

The Lists feature in general has been popular among Twitter users. It brings a sense of organization to the service that was simply lacking in the past. You can pretty much set up your Twitter feed as you would an RSS feed reader. It also works as a great discovery tool. You can look at the lists that have been created by people you arleady follow and find other great people to follow (if the lists are public).

The lists feature should be taken as a reason to post quality tweets. The better your tweets, the more likely you are to gain more followers. Now these followers can add you to lists and increase your follower count even more. If you appear on these lists and bloggers and other site owners post those lists via the widget, you are potentially looking at a great deal of added exposure, and maybe even traffic.
 

Have You Read This?

> Twitter Expands the "Lists" Feature

> How Does Bing Rank Tweets?

> Driving Traffic with Twitter

Google Caught In Another Patent Dispute

It looks like at least a few of Google's lawyers who specialize in patent law are about to get some work to do.  Google - along with Adobe - has been sued by a company named Textscape because the search giant allegedly violated a patent Textscape was granted in 1998. 

Jeremy Kirk reports that the patent "covers a method for managing a body of text on a computer . . . .  Textscape says Google's Chrome's browser improperly uses the innovation."
 
And if that leaves you feeling a little befuddled, Kirk continues, "The lawsuit specifically mentions the 'find' feature in Chrome, which allows a search of text on a Web page and indicates the location of search hits in the scrollbar."

Interesting, eh?  It's anybody's guess how far the suit will get.  At this moment, the lawyers we mentioned earlier are probably researching examples of prior art. 

One thing that's important to note, however, is that this suit isn't a potential showstopper.  Whereas some companies have been known to claim that they deserve credit for part of Google's search engine or advertising machine, Google could survive a change to the free Web browser that less than five percent of the online population uses.

Google to Start Crawling Google Docs Documents

Google has quietly announced that Google Docs documents that are published will soon be crawlable. This means if you have published documents as web pages, or used the publish/embed option for a document, and it has been linked to on the web, it can be indexed by Google and other search engines.

"This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people," says Google Employee "Marie F," on the Google Docs Help Forum.

The change does not apply to documents that are set to "allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)." Any concerned users, who do not wish for their published documents to be indexed can un-publish them by:

- going to the "share tab"

- For documents and spreadsheets, choosing "publish as web page". For presentations choosing "publish/embed"

- Clicking the button that says "stop publishing".

Google notes that Google Apps users may find that they're unable publish documents to the world if the admin of the domain has disallowed publishing outside the domain.

The company said they will be launching the change in a couple weeks. Keep an eye on the help forum for an update on when the change goes live.

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