[hartror]

Deal? Or is this an artifact that Google doesn't index content behind a paywall so WSJ has to display the whole article to the Google spider and anyone who's refer is Google. If WSJ (or anyone else) doesn't want to lose the search engine traffic they're force to do this.

[nl]

It's a Google policy called "First Click Free":

To implement First Click Free, you need to allow all users who find a document on your site via Google search to see the full text of that document, even if they have not registered or subscribed to see that content. The user's first click to your content area is free. However, once that user clicks a link on the original page, you can require them to sign in or register to read further.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

[SomeCallMeTim]

Right, and as of right now (past midnight MT) that trick isn't working any more.

[nikcub]

do it through Google News:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=au&tbm=nws&#3...

try running the search manually yourself.

I had a feature in on of my chrome extension that would do this automatically but it was too flaky to release - but I did find that referrals from the news site worked most of the time.

[sneak]

No, they don't have to do this for anyone who's referer is Google. They could do it for just the Googlebot.

[JoachimSchipper]

Doing that will get you removed from Google's index, or at least severely penalized.