Dave Taylor posts that AdSense are testing with a select group of publishers a program called ‘Site Authentication’ where they allow publishers to run their ads on password protected sites – something not previously allowed. He publishes part of an email that AdSense sent to testers:
‘”You are one of a select group of publishers that has been chosen to try out our new Site Authentication feature. Site Authentication allows publishers to give our crawler access to login-protected content so that users can receive targeted ads. While there is no obligation for you to try out this new feature, you may find it helpful if you have pages of your site protected behind a login screen.
“As an example, an online newspaper site may protect content behind a login for premium readers. Without Site Authentication, the publisher can’t show readers targeted ads on those premium pages because our crawler has not been able to access the content. Using Site Authentication, the publisher can now specify details for our crawler to pass the login screen and reach the protected content, allowing AdSense to serve relevant ads to the readers.”‘
This probably won’t impact too many bloggers but membership sites, forums that need registration and newspapers will be interested to see if this is a test that becomes available to others.
Read more at Dave’s post at “Can I use Google AdSense on password-protected areas?”
About Darren Rowse
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
Glad to see comments are working again
With BB Press easily integrated with WordPress, I think we will start seeing more bloggers with their own forums.
It is fairly easy to have selected posts or even parts of posts only visible to subscribers (encouraging signing up)
Hmmmm, now if they would just use the webmaster tools section to allow the same thing for password protected content and organic search. Then some of the larger newspapers could stop cloaking :)