#10691 – how does 4SEO deal with registered access content

Hi

Does 4SEO index and submit everything or does it ignore Registered Access Status articles?

4SEO crawls the site just like Google does, by loading them through a regular web request and looking for links.

Therefore it's not "logged-in" and cannot access any content that requires logging-in. It can see the links to such pages, but won't be able to read their content and report/act on them. 

Note that - just like Google, we're looking only for real links (ie <a> HTML tags), so things created with javascript will not be seen or taken into account.

A big question is: are links to all these pages accessible to non-logged-in users? If not (ie even the list of articles requires subscription), then 4SEO won't even see any of them at all.

but we'd then want to have that link spawn a page and/or popup with information on our trial subscriptions, an invitation to contact the publisher for a one time walkthrough,

Well, that's more of a design choice on your site, right? 4SEO does not impact the site content, it just reads it. If your site redirects/show a popup to non-logged-in visitors when they try to follow a link to a restricted page, that's what 4SEO will see.

- If there's a redirect to a log-in page, 4SEO will classify the URL as "broken link".

- if the page renders normally (ie a 200 status code) but you render a different content for non-subscribers, then it's likely all these pages will be seen by 4SEO and may appear in the sitemap and list of pages. In that case, I would exclude them from the sitemap using Sitemap | Settings | Included content as you don't want Google to see all these pages, at least in that way.

There's a rather sophisticated way of providing only Google with your restricted content (that's how big newspapers with a paywall can have their result indexed), but 4SEO does not support that. It consists in adding specific structured data information but only when it's the Google bot visiting. So you give your paid content to Google but they know it's paid content and they use it in their search results but won't quote or give away the content.

Our Elastic search function is only accessible via login. Are there rules, exclusions to set. etc???

Depends on how you do it, how you implemented it. But if it's behind log-in, 4SEO simply won't see it.

Typically, Search results (of any kind) should be no-indexed, so yes, I'd suggest adding a noindex rules for these pages, if they have a specific URLs pattern you can identify, or belong to a specific Joomla component (SEO Tools | SEO rules then create a Metadata rule and use the Robots tags selector.

Thanks for your time and superb software. Long time customer.

Many thanks for your kind words, long time customers are indeed the best!

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

i noted your blog post that 4SEO will advance into structured data soon.

We'll have better structured data in the coming year, that's a focus of this year. But 4SEO is already (and has been since launch in early 2021) a full replacement for Tassos.

What Tassos has is more "plugins", support for more extensions, but if you don't use these extensions (ie you use mostly Joomla content, Hikashop, J2Store), then Tassos does not bring anything. 

If you ask me, 4SEO is much easier to configure Structured data rules for that Tassos, but that's me ;) (in fact, with regular Joomla content, you don't need any configuration, it works out of the box).

You can certainly use both, but you will have to disable 4SEO structured data support under Structured Data | Settings so that both do not output structured data on the same page.

I like Route 66's analysis, much like Yoast..

There's a reason 4SEO does not implement such super-simple content recommendation: they tend to generate "over-optimized" content, content that's meant more for SEO than actual users. And that's exactly what Google is trying to publish with their "Helpful Content Updates" of the last 18 months. So while you can get some benefits from such recommendation, if you take them with a grain of salt, for most people it's likely not going to produce great content anymore. The days of "keywords-based" content are gone...

That said, there's of course no problem using Route 66 to provide guidance while you write your content. 4SEO does not do anything at this stage. It reads your content as it's rendered by Joomla, in the page content. It's not involved at editing or writing time.

And in return i just upped my subscription to PRO.

Thanks very much for that, it's a little bit too rare I think ;)

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr