Metered paywall & seo

[idosmaccount]

Hello

In our site we are planning to add a metered paywall, a kind of soft paywall, in which users can see X pages on the site with no restriction, and then on the next page (X+1) they are blocked and need to register.

How will this affect SEO?

Should we cancel the block on search engine spiders?

If the block is just JS popping up a full-screen popup, but the actual content is loaded, is that ok? or another method should be utilized?

Thanks!

[NgEF]

Hello idosmaccount,

Sounds like your site is a news site? I'd probably need more information to help out.

There's multiple approaches to this issue. If you've no-indexed or blocked off the pages in your robots.txt, you also lose the possible search traffic that those pages could bring. What other news sites have done to try to resolve this is to build in a on-page paywall similar to this https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/pocket-rocket-packs-a-punch

This approach allows for a 'sneak peek' of the page's content, also allows for the page to be indexed, and also allows for the user that comes in via search traffic the chance to convert to a paid subscription that unlocks the page's content.