Are Search Engines Getting Through?

[jmeyers]

Hello
I have over 100 product pages that I'm hoping the Search Engines are able to index. If they are able to index, will the links that are being re-directed to the member options page cause the search engines to drop my site?

Also, would it be possible to give free visitors a window to view the page (90 seconds or so) then redirect to the signup page?

Thanks
Jack

[Cristián Lávaque]

Whatever the normal visitor can see in your site is what the Google bot will see too. If the normal visitor gets redirected to the MOP (Membership Options Page), so will the bot.

So you can't have the bot index the content of a protected page but not show it to the normal visitor. Well, you could but this is frown upon by Google and it could penalize you.

You could show the content for a moment and then redirect, but this would be easy to side-step. If you do it with JavaScript, you just disable JS on the page and you remain there. If you use an HTML redirection, I could save the page before being redirected.

One thing you could do is show a part of the content as a teaser and the rest only to paying users. Instead of the metabox to apply the access restriction that would redirect, you can use conditionals in the protected pages. WP Admin -> s2Member -> API / Scripting -> Simple/Shortcode Conditionals

Using a filter to edit the content of the post/page, you could probably create a template for them that applies the conditional to all posts/pages instead of having to edit each one.

I hope this helps.

[jmeyers]

Thanks Cristian. It's nice to know I have options. Now to figure what will work best. It's obvious I need to get educated in API/scripting. I've opened the site up for all to buy for now, so I won't lose sales over it.

Also, is there a forum on using WP Multisite with S2member?

Jack

[Cristián Lávaque]

No, there isn't a forum specifically for multisite installations, you can just post in this same forum. Yeah, learning some scripting basics is helpful. If you need help developing a customization, you can also get freelancers to do it for you. viewforum.php?f=37