Question. What role do you think paywalls have in this? As in: are paywalls forcing reputable sites down the rank list because they aren’t contributing as many tokens?
Some of the top 100 sites are paywalled, which suggests to me that someone made some ad hoc decisions about which were important to include. The NYT and Nature, for instance, are near the top of the list despite being paywalled, but the Wall Street Journal was very low in comparison. I don't know how search engines deal with paywalls, but there might be some process for this. I think you're right that paywalls are a factor here, but without a detailed crawl methodology it's hard to be sure exactly how much.
Question. What role do you think paywalls have in this? As in: are paywalls forcing reputable sites down the rank list because they aren’t contributing as many tokens?
Some of the top 100 sites are paywalled, which suggests to me that someone made some ad hoc decisions about which were important to include. The NYT and Nature, for instance, are near the top of the list despite being paywalled, but the Wall Street Journal was very low in comparison. I don't know how search engines deal with paywalls, but there might be some process for this. I think you're right that paywalls are a factor here, but without a detailed crawl methodology it's hard to be sure exactly how much.