Paying to read content? What is this? A dictatorship?
Ok, so the sun have locked their site down and despite me not actually reading the sun – i wanted to read an article today and it said i needed to pay…
SO
If you’d like to read articles for free, just visit the page in Google Chrome, press F12 to open the console;
Press the cog icon in the bottom right, and then select Overrides, and set it to Googlebot.
As soon as you’ve written this in, refresh the sun window and it will show the full article.
The Sun will require google to index the content, so restricting them from viewing it like they did to me doesn’t make sense.
This simply exploits that fact, and makes the Sun website think you are the googlebot.
You can also install browser extensions to change your User Agent – as if you close the developer window and browse about after using this method, it will reset eventually. Using an extension means this isn’t the case.
Happy Days.
Disclaimer: I am providing this guide for information purposes only and is not to be used in the real world. Anyone using this to view the sun website for free is doing so off their own back and is nothing to do with me.
3 replies on “How to read the Sun website for free”
No longer seems to work (if it ever did), as login still required to view whole story’s. The sun has leaders on each page which bots can crawl anyway.
This has stopped working now. Any new ideas?
You should still be able to trick it, try some different User Agents.
It has to let googlebot in as it wouldn’t get its content indexed otherwise.