A gated website is basically a website that requires a subscription to access.
I want to know if links in gated websites can be crawled by Google. Will these links do good to SEO?
If Google cannot access the page then Google cannot crawl them. Some news websites, which require a subscription, allow Googlebot to access them so they can index the content and then they typically require a subscription by the viewer to see past page 1, but most sites do not allow search engine bots to to crawl their pages behind the gate so they do not get indexed.
Thanks revium. So, can I say if pages cannot get indexed by search engine, backlinks in those pages will mean nothing to SEO, right?
Backlinks, content, nothing … if Google can’t see it without logging in then it doesn’t exist.
You could rather do SEO for your homepage and that would do! Since your inner pages require subscription to access, i don’t think you would want them to show up in search engine!
[FONT=verdana]Actually, Google does have a way of handling this. It has a feature called “First click free”, where webmasters can allow a visitor to access the first article for a given site. If the user then clicks through to another page, they reach the login or registration page as usual. More information here.
Another approach would be to post a one-paragraph keyword-rich summary of each article in a separate directory. Make these summaries freely accessible to all. In each case, include a link to the login / registration page. Then, in robots.txt, make sure the relevant directory is crawlable, but disallow crawlling of the directory that holds the subscription articles.
In both cases, searchers will always find a useful result, and the website has a chance of converting them to registered users.
Mike
[/FONT]