You may recall that I wrote last year about Google’s First Click Free policy, allowing online publishers to protect their content whilst allowing Googlebot in to index the content, so that all their lovely keyword-rich content wasn’t hidden behind a “pay-wall” (i.e. password protected for paying users).
With a lot of hoo-hah about blocking Google from news sites, led by Rupert Murdoch (draw your own conclusions about that one…), Google have announced a change of their First Click Free policy, so that webmasters can block users from Google after five visits per day.
For those with paid-for content, this is probably good news, but you can’t help feeling that the site owners need Google more than Google needs them…