Allowing google to access web content

krishna

Some of the pages on our website require you to log in to view then. No charge, just so we can have some idea of which user groups are using them (we are a charity and need to report to funders). But we still want content to appear on google searches and are happy for people to look at those individual pages without having to log in, but to have to log in if they want to view more.

I understand this is possible, and the following page describes some of the code that might be needed, but where do I need to put this code?

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80553

Thanks

S0litaire

Check this help page:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37081

You need to add some info to your adsence account to allow google's crawler (the thing that gets the data for google searches) to see protected sites.

ehlo

The link that S0litaire has provided allows the Google bot to login to your site, however this is only so they can provide suitable advertisements. Restricted pages from this method will not appear in Google searches.

You can use the link that you have posted to identify Google and show content to them without a login however if they discover that you are doing this (they have search robots that aren't identifiable too!) they will probably ban your site completely. The practice of showing one thing to robots and another (in this case a login page) to visitors is known as cloaking. Google consider this to be wrong because it is a tactic used by spammers to improve their sites in search results and they can't differentiate between them and your legitimate site.

krishna

I was going to allow people to view the page they find through a Google search, even if it is in the restricted area. Google do allow that. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html

Just want to encourage people to register/log in.

ehlo, you say I can do that using the information in the link I provided. Can you elaborate on where I put this information on the Googlebot?