Free to learn, paid to certify
Alison is an Irish online learning platform offering a large catalogue of free courses across business, technology, health, languages and personal development. The learning is free; the revenue comes from certificates, diplomas and advertising.
That model breaks the default course marketplace schema in a specific way. A price field collected naively returns zero for every row, which is technically correct and analytically useless. The commercial structure lives one level down, in what a learner can buy after completing: digital certificates, physical certificates, framed versions, each at its own price.
The catalogue is also multilingual, and the crawl rules make that visible - separate paths exist for Spanish, Portuguese and French course listings. The same course therefore appears under several addresses, which is a deduplication problem that has to be handled during collection rather than discovered in the delivered file.
Course listings respond directly with substantial content, and crawl rules are published, disallowing search query URLs across the language paths while leaving the catalogue itself open.
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