SEO Behind a paywall.

[HashtagHustler]

Good Morning!

Does anybody have any experience with SEO behind a paywall. If we have a portion of a website that is going to be locked, will google still be able to access all of that regardless of paying? If not is there any way to circumvent that?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!

MOZel Tov!

[Highland]

It's ironic you're asking that today. Search Engine land has an excellent article on just that

First click free: We’ve worked with subscription-based news services to arrange that the very first article seen by a Google News user (identifiable by referrer) doesn’t require a subscription. Although this first article can be seen without subscribing, any further clicks on the article page will prompt the user to log-in or subscribe to the news site….

It is possible to limit the number of free articles that a Google News reader can access via First Click Free. A user coming from the domain [.google.] must be able to see a minimum of 5 articles per day. This practice is described as “metering” the user: when the user has clicked on too many of a publisher’s articles from Google News, the meter for freely accessible articles on that site is exhausted.

If your site meters access on a weekly or monthly basis, you are still responsible for showing a minimum of five articles per day to Google users. Otherwise, your site will be treated as a subscription site.

[HashtagHustler]

Oh that is pretty great!

Do you know if there is any impact from using either? They don't directly answer that in the article.

The site I am working with is offering video which would be behind a paywall. My thought is lock down the video, but make the text free, especially since google can't read videos anyway!