Community Support Forums

I was wondering if google will still be able to crawl my blog and index my new posts and page additions. The only reason I'm asking is I've noticed a very steep drop in my post's ranking after activating this membership plugin.

Thank you,

Chris Lauscher

Hi Chris. Thanks for your inquiry.

If you protect content from public access, that content will be unavailable to the public, and that includes search engines. So protecting content should be done carefully, with limited sections of your site. That way you won't prevent your *entire* site from gaining search engine exposure.

For instance, you might have several Posts/Pages that are for "members only", but the rest of your site is available publicly. It all comes down to the way your strategy is formed.

Oh, does that mean that putting content for members only will hurt my google ranking and any keyword or SEO used will be "wasted"??? I think this might be a BIG factor in choosing s2Member or some other plugin/software. I hope i am wrong.

It means that if you protect a page from being accessed by those who didn't pay, that'll keep search engines out too, and if you want search engines to crawl certain pages, you shouldn't protect those.

s2Member, or any other content protection plugin, would not be of much use if it showed all the protected content to the search engine, since then anyone would have access to it via the search engine's cache without paying you for it.

Basically, for SEO purposes, but also for trust building with visitors, you will need to have some public content (open to all) in addition to the protected content (paid, restricted).

I hope that makes it clear.

I guess i might have understook the SEO wrong. I could imagine search engine finding the content/pages/posts, posting them with the little bit it usually displays but then, it would lead to a page that says "you need to register/be a member to access this page". I actually was told that Wishlist does give the option to let the search engines take note of the keywords and such.

And of course i will have public content, but if the "protected" content was to be considered, it would be even more useful, don't you think? I might find a way around then, with using some index or table of content that would direct to the membership area.

Thanks for the answer (even if it is not the one i was hoping!)

Well, you can show a public preview of the content, with the rest protected, if that's what you mean. Also, if you want Google to get to the page, even if it can't see the protected content, you can do it with conditionals in the body of the post/page, instead of using s2Member's meta box in the editing form to protect the whole thing. WP Admin -> s2Member -> API / Scripting.

Is that what you hoped for?

One more thing, if you thought of letting Google see all the content, while keeping it off limits from the general public and requiring them to pay, this may violate Google's policy. I'm pretty sure they have a rule that requires one to show visitors the pages one lets Google index, otherwise they'd be showing a result that's not really available to the person searching. And you also have the problem of Google's cache available to anyone without paying you for it.

Ohhhhhhhhhhh... didn't know about those rules. I was mostly hoping for RANKING. Afterall, although keywords are important, other variables are taken into account, like number of pages, links, etc. so it is too bad that those other settings might be lost in the ranking.

I'll look into the scripting part (although that is totally foreign language for me at this point).

Thanks for your detailed information. Much appreciated.

You're very welcome, I'm glad to help.

In the page I pointed you to, look at the Using Simple Conditionals panel. Since you're not experienced with code, that may be the best one to look at for now.

Oh, and this video may help you understand how s2Member will display/protect your content in other areas of your blog, such as archive pages, depending on your theme's preview settings for the posts and how you configured s2Member's alternative views.

viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2851

Thank you . Much to study, still!