They even describe how to mark up your paywalled stuff to help them differentiate it from cloaking.[1]
"This structured data helps Google differentiate paywalled content from the practice of cloaking, which violates spam policies."
Which is just odd to me. Why present a paywalled search result, when the market is so fragmented that the odds the user has a subscription are so small?
Feels like a no win situation for Google. Do you show results that people don't want to pay for, or do you not show any subscription needed results and people accuse you of monopoly behavior only showing sites running adsense.
Right? It doesn't have to fully elide the result even. If the top of the SERP said "3 results hidden because they are paid sites on your non-subscribed list" I would appreciate the info.
They had a simple rule that they index what users can see and if you try to cheat your way around that you get ranked down. Sticking to that for everyone would have been an iron clad defense against monopoly accusations. Instead they chose to help certain corporations (or at least corporations with certain business models) present different content to the bot and users.
Add Steam forums to those. 9 out of ten times, game walkthroughs or hints can only be found on Steam, according to whichever search engine. But only if you have a login there, of course...
Indeed, I just checked, it's not the entire Steam community site. Looks like it's a per-subcommunity (per-game?) setting whether the community section is open to the public or not. Luckily there's a lot of content that's not behind a login wall.
