Paywall Schema

[Soupmaster]

Has anyone dealt with a content paywall; where you have added schema data for the paywall? If so, did you see a boost in rankings? I keep my premium content on my server until someone upgrades then add it to my site. Looks like for paywall schema, it's main purpose is for those web owners who send over the premium content to the browser but keep it hidden. And they may or may not add the schema data to avoid cloaking penalties. So I am just wondering, not factoring in cloaking penalities because my site doesn't do that, would you expect to see a boost in rankings because Google now knows what premium content I am offering? Or does the Google say, users cant see it so we don't care either? Thanks for any help.

[martinibuster]

Google's mission is to provide access to information.
Google has a long relationship with content providers, particularly news sites. I attended the very first Google Zeitgeist many years ago at their Mountain View headquarters. I met the publisher of the NYTimes as well as Sergei Brin. News organizations were very concerned about how they were going to participate in this new Internet ecosystem. Many of the speeches I heard expressed this anxiety.

Google's guidelines allow for the crawling of content that's behind the paywall. Presumably this is to be able to lead users to the content that they want, as the content has value and satisfies a need. If they value the information they will pay for it. That's how I interpret the intent behind Google's guidelines on Pay-walled Content [developers.google.com]:

If you want Google to crawl and index your entire page (including the paywalled sections), make sure Googlebot (and Googlebot-News if applicable) can access your page.

As you can see, allowing Google to crawl the paywalled content is fine. It's up to the user to decide whether or not whether they wish to pay for the content. If it's not worth paying then it must not have been that important. Sounds fair to me and a win-win for everyone.

[Soupmaster]

Thank you. That was very helpful. I'll go ahead and update the schema data (allowing google to see my content behind the paywall) and if anyone else is facing this issue, I'll gladly post my results.