Archiving doesn't give them clicks though. I get your point- I imagine the search engines prioritize paywalled sites because they get a kickback. So I'm guessing that eventually that is all they would return.
That still works hilariously because the site admins seem to be boomers
Nah, dude. You need the whole text content to load so that search engines can index it. After loading the article, you swap in the popup with javascript for the users. Archives don't reproduce the javascript so you get what the crawlers see.
The reason this works is unironically because of Googlebot. These paywall sites want to be at the top of search engine results, so they have to exempt Googlebot and other spiders from the paywall block, otherwise the data can't be indexed. All archive does is spoof the common spider user-agent headers on its requests, and poof, they get in.
I just get around pay walls by using an archive site /shrug.
Archiving doesn't give them clicks though. I get your point- I imagine the search engines prioritize paywalled sites because they get a kickback. So I'm guessing that eventually that is all they would return.
Nah, dude. You need the whole text content to load so that search engines can index it. After loading the article, you swap in the popup with javascript for the users. Archives don't reproduce the javascript so you get what the crawlers see.
The reason this works is unironically because of Googlebot. These paywall sites want to be at the top of search engine results, so they have to exempt Googlebot and other spiders from the paywall block, otherwise the data can't be indexed. All archive does is spoof the common spider user-agent headers on its requests, and poof, they get in.