Paywalled. :-(
You'd guess that's EXACTLY the kind of shitty behavior that google claims to flag/penalize the website.. but.. here's a google-golf hit for the article:
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+search+for+extraterrestr...
Surely.. only the "excerpt" is served to google right? Nope... click though the cached copy. The article is indexed in full.
Right.
I have nothing against linking paywalled resources, but that's scummy behavior.
Skipped.
Because of that, I think not taking measures against this behaviour is the lesser evil.
(edit: small potatoes)
It's scummy on the economist's side from a SEO perspective which I absolutely hate in all media outlets that do this.
If the full article is allowed to be indexed by a search engine, the expectation is to be able to get the _same_ result as the search engine is seeing when you click through.
This is clearly a cheap way to rank higher in search results. If you don't want non-paying users to read, then the same excerpt should be shown to the search engine.