Content Locker - Effect on SERPS?

Hi all,

I've run a search on a few variations of this question but haven't come up with anything. Basically I want to know if Google lowers your Serps ranking if you have a content locker on your site. If so, how big is the impact and is there any way to hide the locker from search engines

Links to answers also welcome in case i've missed something.

Thanks!

I'd say no but I do wonder if you put lockers from zango/pinball if it does as google knows if 'the site may be harmful to your computer' so surely that factors into their serps somehow....

Check out this thread: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/311974-so-google-penalizes-you-content-lockers-now.html

I had the same problem with losing SERPS. You just can't put the gateway on the page that's getting the search traffic. It's some good ideas in that thread to work around it though, so you should be able to figure the problem out.

Yes it will hurt the SERPs. Just make sure you have some content on the indexed page annd have the content locked content on another page.

Thanks everyone! I had noticed some pages with gates slipping whilst others without gate were stable. Having a link to a gated page from the ranking page and editing robot.txt to stop google reading gated page seems the easiest solution.

I had zango sometime back on one of my sites and google marked it as 'dangerous', so you must be careful. The best solution is to display the normal page to google's bot

I think people are all giving you good advice, and they might seem to conflict, but there are two separate issues. The gateway itself, might set off a decrease in serps by increasing your code to content ratio a little, but it is the offers that you link to that are probably setting of the alarms.

If it is a white hat locker, you might check out a simple dhtml unblockable popup. It doesn't come loaded with javascript acrobatics and is pretty customisable by anyone who can build a webpage, just don't put anything spammy into it, in fact keyword it, and if you don't have a single gateway sitewide, but make them page by page, make sure you are not getting a dupe content punishment if they are all similar in wording.



Also, try to stay away from the download or pay per install offers for your site.