Paywalled content is content that is fully visible only after payment, subscription or registration. Google can crawl and index it, and the site owner marks it with structured data to show that access is restricted.
How do you mark paywalled content?
The markup helps Google tell paywalled content apart from cloaking, which violates its spam policies. The property isAccessibleForFree set to false states that content is not freely available. The restricted section is identified with hasPart and a cssSelector, and Google supports class selectors only. JSON-LD and microdata are both accepted.
Google’s documentation mentions flexible sampling, a model in which part of the content is freely accessible while the rest sits behind the paywall. In October 2017 Google removed the First Click Free requirement for Search and let publishers choose their own sampling scheme. It names two types: metering, a quota of free articles, and lead-in, where the start of an article stays free.
Example
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "NewsArticle",
"isAccessibleForFree": false,
"hasPart": {
"@type": "WebPageElement",
"isAccessibleForFree": false,
"cssSelector": ".paywall"
}
}
Common mistakes
Some JavaScript paywalls send the full text in the server response and hide it with JavaScript until the subscription is confirmed. Google says this is not a reliable way to limit access to the content. The full content should only be delivered once the subscription status is confirmed on the server.
Sources
- Subscription and paywalled content structured data – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Fix Search-related JavaScript problems – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Enabling more high quality content for users – Google Search Central Blog (Oct 2, 2017)developers.google.com
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