In addition to Google's First Click Free, should you whitelist search engine bots past a paywall?
- by tobek
Our site has subscription-only pages - non-subscribed visitors see a snippet preview. As per Google's FCF requirements, your first 5 hits to a subscriber-only pages with .google. as the referrer, you see the full page.
In addition to this, should we whitelist search engine bots so that they can index the full content? I assume this is not required for Google, which can use FCF to index our content, but what about other search engines? Is this considered cloaking?
My gut says that whitelisting bots past the paywall is bad practice., but I wanted to confirm - any evidence or references would be amazing.