The Wall Street Journal’s Fancy SEO Tricks

I’m not an SEO expert. So if there were a group of SEO experts standing in the corner, I wouldn’t be among them. I would be among the mere mortals, who apply basically their common sense to how search engines work.

All that said by way of longwinded preamble, I did happen upon a fun realization this morning, in the spirit of “The internet routes around….”

The WSJ does this thing called cloaking. It essentially means they show Google a different website from what they show you. The googlebot sees no paywall and waltzes right in. You hit a “subs only” paywall and get frustrated. Or maybe you pay for the subscription. Still, though, I doubt google pays the subscription, and so even if you see the whole website too, you see a costly website, whereas google sees a free website.

The net result for the WSJ is that it cleverly gets its entire articles indexed, making them easier to find in google, but is able to maintain its paywall strategy. The net result for you and me is that it’s sometimes a pain in the neck to read the WSJ—which is too bad, because it’s a great read. It’s also a pain in the neck to share WSJ articles, as Deputy Managing Editor and Executive Editor Online @alansmurray’s sometimes plaintive “subs only” tweets evince.

But there’s a way around the mess. Actually, there are a couple ways around. One involves the hassle of teaching my mom how to waltz in like google does, and one involves me doing it for her. I prefer the latter.

But let’s rehearse the former first. Let’s say you hit the paywall. What do you do? You copy the headline, paste it into google, and hit enter. This works way better if you’ve got a search bar in your browser. Once you hit enter, you come to a search results page. You’ll know which link to click because it won’t be blue. Purple means you’ve been there before, so click that link. It will take you back to your article, but you’ll be behind the paywall, gazing at unabridged goodness. It’s not too hard, and the upside it terrific. That said, this procedure is much easier to perform than it is to explain, and the whole thing is pretty unintuitive, so my efforts to spread the word have led to little.

But there’s a better way, for the sharing, a least—a way that involves letting the geekiest among us assume the responsibility of being geeky. It’s natural, and you don’t have to rely on your mother’s ability to route around. Instead, once you decide you want to share a WSJ article, grab the really long URL that sits behind google’s link on its search returns page. They look something like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB125134056143662707.html&ei=4oiWSouFJIuGlAez86GqDA&usg=AFQjCNEhRb_n571tSnJZrK-uru_0owFz9g&sig2=3rZbZnhOu11lo3bOUojDfA

Then push that horribly long URL—itself unfit for sharing in many contexts—into your favorite URL shortener. Send that shortened URL to your mom, or post it to twitter.

No one will ever know the article you’re sharing sits behind WSJ’s grayhat paywall.

LATE UPDATE: I write a follow-up post prompted by @alansmurray’s response, comparing his situation to the one occupied by the folks at Starbucks.

LATER UPDATE: Alex Bennert from the WSJ points out that the WSJ’s fancy trick is in fact sponsored by google and called First Click Free. See his her link below and my reply.