> They serve the full article to Google, which allows Google to show you excerpts that you have to pay for.
I'm old enough to remember when that was grounds for getting your site removed from Google results - "cloaking" was against the rules. You couldn't return one result for Googlebot, and another for humans.
No idea when they stopped doing that, but they obviously have let go of that principle.
I remember that too, along with high-profile punishments for sites that were keyword stuffing (IIRC a couple of decades ago BMW were completely unlisted for a time for this reason).
I think it died largely because it became impossible top police with any reliability, and being strict about it would remove too much from Google's index because many sites are not easily indexable without them providing a “this is the version without all the extra round-trips for ad impressions and maybe a login needed” variant to common search engines.
Applying the rule strictly would mean that sites implementing PoW tricks like Anubis to reduce unwanted bot traffic would not be included in the index if they serve to Google without the PoW step.
I can't say I like that this has been legitimised even for the (arguably more common) deliberate bait & switch tricks is something I don't like, but (I think) I understand why the rule was allowed to slide.
I'm old enough to remember when that was grounds for getting your site removed from Google results - "cloaking" was against the rules. You couldn't return one result for Googlebot, and another for humans.
No idea when they stopped doing that, but they obviously have let go of that principle.