this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
193 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
59174 readers
2116 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They'd like to allow search engines and block (non-paying) visitors, but they took a lazy approach to it.
The correct approach would indeed be to identify paying visitors (user+password) and search engines correctly (secret key), then they can reliably shut down everyone else.
But that would require Google to cooperate and I suspect they don't want to set a precedent where they let a website dictate how they get content. They like to deal from an all or nothing position.
Of course there are other methods, such as making public just enough about the article to be relevant in searches, but I don't know why they don't do that. Probably lowers their SEO effectiveness if I were to guess.