Google indexing on content behind a paywall

[EvanDC]

Hi -  I'm not all that clued up on SEO unfortunately. 

The vast majority of my site will be held behind a subscription paywall. Is there a way to make it so that subscription only content can also be spidered/indexed by search engines? 

I'm guessing it's not possible but thought I'd ask. Thanks. 

[teraßyte]

The  only way would be to make the user bypass the paywall if their UserAgent is from Google. But then everyone would be able to bypass it just changing their UA.

Not to mention that Google penalizes sites that show different content to them compared to a normal guest.

[Nathan Explosion]

So..cloaking:

the act of presenting different content to the search engine (which accesses the site as a guest), which isn't actually accessible to the guest if they viewed your site, usually to manipulate search rankings and/or mislead users.

Yep, frowned upon...however:

Quote

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies#cloaking

If you operate a paywall or a content-gating mechanism, we don't consider this to be cloaking if Google can see the full content of what's behind the paywall just like any person who has access to the gated material and if you follow our Flexible Sampling general guidance.

With that in mind, what you would need is something that detects Google's useragent and promotes its access to something that has access to the content. Which would require a plugin.

And then...

15 minutes ago, teraßyte said:

But then everyone would be able to bypass it just changing their UA.

 

[Daniel F]

I would suggest to take a look at the official google docs for paywalls and oaywalled content

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/paywalled-content?hl=en

[Randy Calvert]

@DawPi seems to have a plugin that can do this...