One SEO professional asked John Mueller in a hangout during the submitted Question and Answer segment about paywall structured data.
They asked John about how Google explains in its subscription and paywalled content guidelines that a specific Schema has to be added to your page in order to share paywalled content into the index, while also not triggering a cloaking penalty.
After implementing this, the rich results test does not appear to identify the enhancement.
How are they sure that Google detects the enhancement and that they are not inadvertently risking a cloaking penalty?
John assumes that the rich results test won’t show this, but he hasn’t actually checked it. Because the rich results test, for the most part, focuses on what Google actually would be showing in the search result as a rich result type.
The paywall of content is likely not one of the things that Google would show as a rich result type.
So, it’s possible that they wouldn’t show that in the test. One simple way to do that is to make a very simple test page and just test this page individually.
The other test they could do is a normal URL inspection test.
This happens at approximately the 43:42 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 43:42
Google explains in its subscription and paywalled content guidelines that a specific schema must be added to your page in order to share paywalled content into the index and not trigger a cloaking penalty. After implementing this, however, the rich results test does not seem to identify this enhancement. How can we be sure that Google has detected the enhancement and that we aren’t inadvertently risking a cloaking penalty?
John (Answer) 44:07
So I assume the rich results test will show this, but I haven’t actually checked it. Because the rich results test, for the most part, focuses on what Google actually would show in the search result as a rich results type.
And essentially, the paywall of content is probably not one of the things that we would show as a specific rich result type. So it’s possible that we wouldn’t show that in that test. One simple way to do that is to make a very simple test page and just test that page individually.
The other test that you can do to make sure that Google is actually seeing the full content with the markup is the normal URL inspection test, where you can do a live fetch of the page, and you can look at the HTML that is generated for that page. And you could copy that out into an editor and double check to make sure that you’re you’re kind of–the structured data that you want to have visible there is actually shown. So that’s kind of the direction I would head there.
