Giving Search Engines an S2 Level

[philipt18]

I know about the Alternate View Protection, but that seems to solve the reverse of my issue. I want Google, Bing, etc. to index the pages that are available to my free subscribers (s2 Level 0), but not anything for higher levels.

I believe you can prevent caching by Google using the noarchive tag, although I'm not sure of the details. It would be great if s2Member allowed one to specify the s2 Level that search engines could see, and also allowed one to shut off caching by Google so people couldn't see the whole page (but the whole page would be searchable).

Is there a way to do these things that I missed? If not, any chance this is on the roadmap?

Thanks.

[Eduan]

I believe you can use Alternative Views Protection.
You can find them under WP Admin -> s2Member -> Restriction Options -> Alternative View Protection ( please read ).

Check this video for more info:
http://www.s2member.com/content-restric ... ble-video/

Hope this helps.

[Cristián Lávaque]

Philip, I'll ask Jason, but I think Google frowns upon being served pages to index that can't be viewed by a person when he finds it in a search result.

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks for the heads up on this thread.

Anything that's protected from public access, is, by definition, not available to anyone or anything that does not meet the criteria that you configure s2Member with. That is, if a Post/Page/Category/Tag/URI requires Membership Level #0, or higher, there is no way for a search engine to spider that content. This is the way it should be.

Of course, there are ways around this. For instance, by default, s2Member does NOT protect excerpts, which allows excerpts from Archive Views and other areas of your theme to be indexed, just not the entire content or Permalink. Much of this is based on your s2Member configuration as well.

It's also possible to take some of your content and duplicate it on Posts/Pages that you might add to a Sitemap.xml file, or feed directly into Google, but not necessarily make available in your navigation menu. Anyway, there are many ways to feed traffic into your site, but content protected by s2Member (at any Level of membership), is not the way to do so, in my opinion.