Gating, Paywalls & SEO - Allspice Labs Docs

Overview

Gating lets you reserve content for members. Before you turn it on it is worth understanding exactly what a gate does to the page, because the default is a soft paywall and that has real consequences for both protection and search.

This page covers what ships in your HTML, what search engines see, and how to switch to hard protection if you need it.

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 the reader sees
Recipe card	The post, photos and your writing stay public. Only the card with ingredients and method is held back.
Content preview	A lead-in portion of the article, then the gate.
Content immediate	The gate appears straight away, with only a teaser sliver above it.

Recipe card gating is only available on recipe pages, since there is no card to gate elsewhere. It is also the gentlest option and generally the best converting: your post keeps ranking and earning traffic, and the ask lands at the moment the reader has decided they want to cook the thing.

Soft Paywall: Read This Before Gating

By default, Allspice gates content with a soft paywall. This is a deliberate choice, and you should know precisely what it means:

The full article is present in the page HTML
The gate is a visual overlay: the content is clamped, faded out, and the page locks scrolling when the gate reaches the viewport
A determined reader can bypass it with view-source or a browser reader mode

In other words, a soft paywall is a conversion mechanism, not a security boundary. It is designed to convert the ordinary reader who wants to keep reading, and it accepts that a technical minority will get around it.

TIP:

This is the same trade-off most large publishers make, and it is what allows the content to stay indexable. If that trade is not right for your content, switch to hard protection below.

Switching to hard protection

In remove mode the content is never sent to the browser at all. Unauthorised readers receive 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 runs the other way: nothing can be bypassed, but search engines also cannot read the gated portion, so those pages will compete for far fewer queries.

Choose remove when the content itself is the product - a paid course, licensed material, something you are contractually obliged to protect. Choose the default overlay when the content is also your marketing.

Gating and SEO

The most common fear about gating is that Google will treat it as cloaking - showing crawlers something different from readers - and penalise the site. Allspice is built specifically to avoid that.

In soft-paywall mode, every gated article carries structured data declaring the paywall to Google, following its published guidance for subscription and paywalled content:

            "@type": "Article",

            "isAccessibleForFree": false,

            "hasPart": {

              "@type": "WebPageElement",

              "isAccessibleForFree": false,

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

            }

This tells Google two things: the article is paywalled, and here is exactly which part. Because you have declared it, serving the body in the HTML is not cloaking - it is the documented way to run an indexable paywall.

What this means in practice: your gated recipes stay eligible to rank. Readers arriving from search see the lead-in and then your gate, which is the moment your membership gets sold.

Recipe schema

When a recipe card is gated, the recipe structured data is removed for unauthorised readers. This keeps your markup honest: it does not advertise ingredients and steps in schema that the reader cannot actually see on the page.

Your membership page is never gated

The generated membership sales page is automatically excluded from gating. A sales page behind its own paywall would be a closed loop, so Allspice prevents it.

Feeds, Excerpts and the REST API

Your article body is not only served on the page. Gating is enforced on every surface where it otherwise leaks:

Surface	Behaviour
RSS feeds	Gated content is removed, in both modes.
Excerpts	Removed everywhere excerpts surface: archives, site search, related-post cards, oEmbed.
REST API	Gated shape for the public. Editors keep raw access so the WordPress admin still works.

TIP:

These surfaces use hard removal even when the page itself is a soft overlay. A full-content RSS feed would otherwise hand your entire gated archive to any feed reader.

Choosing What to Gate

The technical setup is the easy part. The judgement is what to close off.

Do not gate your back catalogue all at once. Those pages carry your search rankings and your returning readers. Closing them overnight converts a few people and annoys many.
Gate forward, not backward. Most publishers reserve new members-only content and leave the archive open.
Start with recipe cards. The lowest-risk way to test whether your audience will pay at all.
Watch traffic for a few weeks after any change. Gating changes what search engines can index, and effects take time to appear.

Troubleshooting

A member still sees the gate

Confirm the domain is attached to the membership
Confirm the membership includes the benefit that page requires
Ask them to reload, which refreshes their access

Gated content is showing in my RSS feed

It should not. Confirm the page is actually 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. In that mode gated content is not indexable at all. If you are on the default overlay mode, confirm how much of your archive you gated at once.

I need content that genuinely cannot be bypassed

Use remove mode, and read the SEO trade-off above before you do.

Gate content without losing your search traffic

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