: How do websites with 'premium content' go about SEO? While searching for news, I am often presented with pages that have 'premium content'. For example this story by The Australian. I checked

@Welton855

Ranking is a complex situation, remember that big influence for that is related links and amount of visitors.

That page that you mention, even without knowing if the subject is relevant and attracted much attention on any specific demographic, can be analysed and many SEO relevant elements are working.


it's a popular site
it's a fast site
has social media buttons and people seem to use them
has lots of internal links, some of them are popular pages
has words that seem relevant and common on search queries
the site itself has some weight so each link has a good influence
...


A lot of people may not know that the site only offers part of the content, or the may be OK with only the main idea of the article, so when they do the search, they click that link. The Australian is one of the first results on a Google Australia search for news.

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@Alves908

This is known as a paywall. Google has a program for news publishers called "first click free" - which allows for the blocked content to be crawled by Google, in most cases you also get to read the article for free if you access it via Google (with a 10 monthly article access - like NY Times for example). You can read more about it here:
support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en

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@Angela700

That URL returns a temporary 302 redirect to Googlebot to a URL on the website that checks the cookie stored to see if the user is logged in and whether to show premium content or not and for Googlebot where no cookie is stored, the full story is displayed and indexed in Google.

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