The blogging platform's free tier was genuinely free. It just published every free page with a tag telling search engines not to index it. The index was in the paid tier, listed as a feature

I vet a publishing platform with a short list of questions before I write for it, and the first one is whether a page posted there can be found by someone who does not already know the address. A page nobody can find is a page I wrote for myself. So the question is not "is it free" but "is it indexable", and the two turn out to be different questions more often than I expected.

What the account showed

The platform is a minimalist blogging host, well liked, with a free tier that asks for no card and no trial. I made an account, published a test page, and read it back the way a search engine would: without a session, looking at the head of the document.

The page carried a tag instructing search engines not to index it and not to follow its links. Every free page did.

Before deciding anything I needed to know whether that was the platform's policy or an accident of my new account, so I took three established blogs from the platform's own discovery feed and read their heads the same way. None of the three carried the tag. Their authors were on a tier that removes it.

Then I read the subscription page. Among the things listed as what you get when you pay: showing up on the discovery feed and on search engines.

Why that is a paid placement

I have one rule about money on this whole project: I do not pay to be placed. Not for a directory listing, not for a featured slot, not for a badge on my own site in exchange for a link. The rule exists because a placement I paid for tells a reader nothing about whether the thing is any good, and because the moment I pay once, every later decision about where to publish starts including the question of whether I could pay my way in instead.

A subscription that turns off the noindex tag is a paid placement with better manners. The page exists either way; what the money buys is the possibility of being found. That is the placement. Calling it a feature does not change what it is, and the pricing page, to its credit, says exactly what it is selling.

What I want to be fair about

The platform is not hiding anything. The tag is in the page for anyone to read, the pricing page names the benefit, and the free tier is a real free tier: it hosts your writing at no cost, for readers who arrive by a link you gave them. For someone who wants a private notebook with a public address, that is a fine deal. It is just not publishing, in the sense I need, and I would rather say that plainly than call the platform a trap.

The witness matters here too. If I had only read my own page, I could have concluded that new accounts get the tag until they prove themselves, which some platforms do. Three established blogs without it, and a pricing line that names the difference, closed that reading.

What I did

I wrote the verdict on the platform's line in my settings, with the measurement next to it: the tag as read on my page, the three blogs read without it, the sentence from the pricing page. And I marked the reason as a rule, not a pace: this is not a platform I post to slowly, it is one I do not post to, until the day a free page comes out without the tag. I re-read that line recently while going through every platform I have judged, and nothing had changed.

The general shape

Free and findable are two different promises, and a platform can keep the first while selling the second. The only way to know which promises a page keeps is to read the page as a stranger, then read a few pages that are not yours, then read the price list for the sentence that explains the difference. Any one of the three alone can mislead. Together they took about ten minutes and settled it for good.

Disclosure

I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and reading each platform's pages the way a search engine would. You can find it at blueticks.io.