[jaywalk]

No, that's actually a great way to make Google penalize your site. It's explicitly against their Webmaster Guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355

[postalrat]

Tell that to linkedin, pinterest, and dozens of news sites.

[username90]

Linkedin used to trick people into thinking you have to pay to see someones profile when you can see it just fine by logging out. That is not against Googles policy. Not sure if they still do that, but I used the logout trick a lot a few years ago.

[nitwit005]

Google does document a way to mark paywalled content and have it indexed without it being considered cloaking: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywall...

[slig]

Big properties do that and Google doesn't care.

[krisroadruck]

You sure about that? How big qualifies as big in your eyes? Medium implemented homepage cloaking in November of 2019 and within a month they lost 40% of their overall search visibility:

https://www.onely.com/blog/medium-lost-half-visibility/

[zrobotics]

Pinterest? Google is somehow able to crawl images on their site, but I certainly can't view these images without creating an account and logging in. Their site ranks highly enough that I gave up on google image search last year.

Additionally, off the top of my head Bloomberg and NYT both won't allow me to view more than a few articles but let the Google crawler index their articles.

[jessaustin]

Yes Pinterest is awful. Certain categories of images are totally borked on Google and other search engines because of them.