Gating, Paywalls & SEO - Allspice Labs Docs

Overview

Gating reserves content for members. You choose what to gate on the Content Access tab of Memberships in the Publisher Portal, and the Allspice WordPress plugin enforces it on your site.

This page covers what ends up in your HTML for each gate type, what search engines see, and how to switch to hard protection. By default, preview and full gates are a soft paywall, which matters for both protection and search.

BEFORE YOU LAUNCH:

Page caching must be configured so member pages are never served from a shared cache, or gated content can leak to everyone. See Memberships & Page Caching.

Gate types

Type	What a non-member sees	In the HTML
Recipe card only	The post, photos and your writing. The recipe card is replaced by the gate.	The card's markup is not sent. The rest of the post is.
Preview gate	A lead-in of the post, then the gate.	The full post, under a soft paywall (default).
Full content gate	The gate near the top, with only a short teaser above it.	The full post, under a soft paywall (default).

Recipe card gating is available only on recipe pages. It currently works with WP Recipe Maker cards. The post keeps ranking and earning traffic, and the offer appears when the reader has decided to cook.

Soft paywall: read this before gating

By default, preview and full gates are a soft paywall:

The full article is in the page HTML
The gate is visual: the content is cut off and faded, and scrolling stops when the gate reaches the screen
A reader can get around it with view-source or a browser's reader mode

A soft paywall is there to convert ordinary readers who want to keep reading. It is not a security boundary. It is also what lets gated content stay indexable.

Switching to hard protection

In remove mode the gated content is never sent to the browser. A preview gate shows a short plain-text preview (the post's manual excerpt, or its first 55 words) and then the gate; a full gate shows only the gate. Add this to your theme's functions.php or a site-specific plugin:

            add_filter('allspice_content_gate_mode', fn() => 'remove');
          

The trade-off: nothing can be bypassed, but search engines can't read the gated content either, so those pages will rank for fewer queries.

Use remove when the content itself is the product, such as a paid course or material you are contractually required to protect. Keep the default overlay when the content is also your marketing.

Gating and SEO

A common worry is that Google will treat a paywall as cloaking (showing crawlers something different from readers). In soft-paywall mode, every gated article carries structured data that declares the paywall, following Google's guidance for subscription and paywalled content:

            "@type": "Article",

            "isAccessibleForFree": false,

            "hasPart": {

              "@type": "WebPageElement",

              "isAccessibleForFree": false,

              "cssSelector": ".allspice-paywalled-content"

            }

This tells Google the article is paywalled and which part is behind the paywall. Declaring it this way is Google's documented method for running an indexable paywall. Gated pages stay eligible to rank, and readers arriving from search see the lead-in and then your gate.

Recipe schema

When a whole post is gated (preview or full gate), the WP Recipe Maker recipe schema is removed for readers without access, so your structured data doesn't advertise ingredients and steps they can't see. WP Recipe Maker's print view for that recipe sends those readers back to the post.

Your membership page is never gated

The membership sales page created by the plugin is always excluded from gating.

Feeds, excerpts and the REST API

Your post content also appears outside the page itself. Gating is enforced there too:

Surface	Behavior
RSS feeds	Replaced with "This content is for members." (or the plain-text preview, for a preview gate), in both modes.
Excerpts	Replaced wherever excerpts appear: archives, site search, related-post cards, oEmbed.
REST API	Public requests get the same notice or preview in place of the content and excerpt. Editors keep full access so the WordPress editor still works.

TIP:

These surfaces always use hard removal, even when the page itself uses the soft overlay. Otherwise a full-content RSS feed would give your gated archive to any feed reader.

Lock badges

The plugin adds a small lock badge, labeled "Members" by default, to the featured image of posts with a preview or full gate wherever your theme lists them: the home page, archives, search results, and related-post cards. Posts with only the recipe card gated don't get a badge.

Badges are on by default. Change the label and color, or turn them off, in the gate design section of the Content Access tab.
Members see the badge too, so members-only posts stay recognizable.
The badge is never added to the post's own featured image on its page.
It attaches to images your theme outputs with WordPress's standard featured-image functions. Themes that build card images another way won't show it.

Choosing what to gate

Don't gate your back catalog all at once. Those pages carry your search rankings and returning readers.
Gate new content first. Many publishers reserve new members-only content and leave the archive open.
Start with recipe cards. It is the lowest-risk way to find out whether your audience will pay.
Watch traffic for a few weeks after any change. Gating changes what search engines can index, and the effects take time to show.

Troubleshooting

A member still sees the gate

Confirm the domain is attached to the membership
Confirm the membership includes the benefit for that kind of page (Premium recipes, Articles, or Pages)
Ask them to reload, which refreshes their access

Gated content is showing in my RSS feed

Confirm the page is gated in the portal, then contact support with the feed URL.

Traffic dropped after I turned on gating

Check whether you are in remove mode, where gated content is not indexable at all. If you are on the default overlay mode, check how much of your archive you gated at once.

No lock badges appear

Check that badges are on in the gate design settings and that the post has a preview or full gate. If both are true, your theme probably builds its card images without WordPress's featured-image functions.

I need content that can't be bypassed

Use remove mode, and read the SEO trade-off above first.

Gate content without losing your search traffic

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