Community Support Forums

Hi, are protected posts readable by search engines?

Hi,

Protecting individual Posts, ONLY protects the Permalinks for those Posts. It is still possible for excerpts of protected content to be seen in search results generated by WordPress®, feeds, and Archive views; such as your Home Page, inside a Category listing, or through other queries formulated by your theme. This is the intended functionality. Excerpts are a great way to "tease" public visitors. In other words, public visitors may have access to excerpts introduced by your theme, but any attempt to view the full Post ( i.e. the Permalink ) will result in an automatic redirect to your Membership Options Page; requiring registration. All of that being said, if you would like to protect many Posts at once ( including Archive views ), you can use Category Level Restrictions, Tag Level Restrictions, or have a look down below at s2Member's options for "Alternative View Protection", which deals with search results, as well as feeds.

s2Member protects Categories, Tags, Posts, Pages, Files, URIs & more. BUT, even with all of those security restrictions, it's still possible for protected content excerpts to be seen through XML feeds, in search results generated by WordPress®; and/or ( depending on your theme ), possibly in other Archive views; which might include: Posts by Author, Posts by Date, a list of featured items formulated by your theme, OR even through other widgets/plugins adding functionality to your site. ~ We refer to all of these collectively, as "Alternative Views".

Using "Alternative Views", by filtering WordPress® database queries, s2Member can automatically hide protected content that is NOT available to the current User/Member. In other words, s2Member is capable of pre-filtering ALL database queries, so that excerpts of protected content will not be allowed to slip through. This is marked "experimental", because we're still testing this against MANY widget/plugin/theme combinations. Please report all bugs.

Hi thank you yes I've read the pages and my posts are protected by categories, tags etc and i understand the implication to users. I just wanted to check that search engines can read the data on the pages which are protected and lead audiences to them (even if when the user gets there they discover they have to sign up?