Content Locker and Robot Crawler, A Modern Love Story
A brief analysis of the impact of content lockers on SEO.
Content lockers have been a growing trend over the last couple years. Whether in the form of paywall or advertising-based, big companies like the New York Time or this website have built successful businesses around them. But what is their impact on SEO?
At the most basic level, the essence of SEO is to make a website rank as high as possible in organic search results. Meaning, making your content more visible to users.
Now imagine you put an obstacle such as a paywall in front of a user intending to access your content. This would seem to run counter-intuitive to providing a good user experience, but not necessarily.
Hard Locker
With hard locker, all content is gated off and the user usually need to pay or subscribe to get access to a game, video or article. At first sight, gated site seems to block content from being crawled or indexed by search engines.
It is clear to say that hard locker and SEO don’t mix easily but it is not impossible. Many newspaper sites have all their gated content indexed on Google and Google News. The only way to achieve that is by closely following Google’s paywall and subscription guidelines. This is strongly limiting your options and can have a significant impact on your user experience.

Soft Locker
As indicated by its name, this kind of locker is taking a softer approach by allowing the users to get somehow access to the content or at least to some part of it.
A soft locker can take different forms such as providing access to a limited portion of an entire article, allowing the user to bypass the locker by doing specific action or limiting the amount of pages a user can visit.
By letting crawlers accessing all or most of the content, a soft locker provides more flexibility from an SEO perspective.

Google ❤ my locker
Our strategy to maximise user experience, SEO and revenue is to combine a Soft Locker approach with a solution allowing crawler to access all the content on the page.
Soft Locker: all pages are accessible to the user, all the content on the page is accessible to the user, the locker appears only when the user engages with the content, the locker can be closed.
Full access to crawlers: the locker needs to be implemented as a Javascript Pop Over. This way the locker is visible by the user but not by the search engine robots. This same method is also used by some traditional display ad format.
Conclusion
Google recognizes the interest of content locker for publishers and does not penalize sites for using them as long as they comply with their general SEO guidelines. Therefore content lockers provide an interesting revenue opportunity for publishers, often less aggressive for the users than invasive ads.
Content locker might well be the most lucrative banner out there.
M. Portman, September 2019
Sources:
https://searchengineland.com/gate-content-seo-implications-195784
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/paywalls-seo-strategy/311359
https://croud.com/blog/seo-all-posts/how-does-paywall-impact-seo/
