Password-protected content

Speaking of spiders, websites with password-protected content don't fare well in organic searches unless they offer a sampling of content for spiders to crawl.

SEO expert Erik Dafforn suggests using abstracts of articles and reports as a teaser for the search engines. If the protected content is a money maker, he says abstracts can be the 5 percent of your content that sells the remaining 95 percent. Dafforn writes in his ClickZ column:

"Distilling a 3,000-word report down to a 200-word summary can be tedious when you have thousands of reports to offer, but when those 200 words thoroughly explain why you need the other 2,800 and won't find them anywhere else, chances are your page (when equipped with proper titling and meta description elements) will contain the essentials for pulling in the proper audience. Add these elements to an effective call to action, and sales will increase without giving away your intellectual property."

Interesting to note that the problem does not affect publishers, who can subscribe to Google's "First Click Free" program. This allows the news archives to be indexed and returns one article for free before activating a subscription screen. Wonder why other organizations can't do this.