Q: Our site is a coupon site, password protected. Does this mean the search engines cannot get to the thousands of pages behind the password protection?
A: That’s correct. If you want those pages in Google’s index, then you’ll need to allow Googlebot access to the pages without requiring log-in or cookies. The way to do this is to provide straight text links into the protected content and then check each visitorâ??s user-agent and/or IP address when the link is accessed. If the user-agent/IP range matches Googlebot’s, then serve up the content; otherwise, serve up the log-in form.