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Yes, that is exactly the case.

We have been testing this and it seems that "Googlebot" doesn't hit the wall at all with the normal settings on. With these results it seems that we don't need to treat "Googlebot" differently because it doesn't seem to store any cookie or local storage data.

Tech savvy users can bypass the pay wall by other means as well so that's not a big concern for us.

My question is about paywalls made with cookies and local storage. We are changing a website with free content to a open paywall with a 5 article view weekly limit.

The paywall is made to work with cookies and local storage. The article views are stored to local storage but you have to have your cookies enabled so that you can read the free articles. If you don't have cookies enable we would pass an error page (otherwise the paywall would be easy to bypass).

Can you say how this affects SEO? We would still like that Google would index all article pages that it does now.

Would it be cloaking if we treated Googlebot differently so that when it does not have cookies enabled, it would still be able to index the page?

My question is about paywalls made with cookies and local storage. We are changing a website with free content to a open paywall with a 5 article view weekly limit.

The paywall is made to work with cookies and local storage. The article views are stored to local storage but you have to have your cookies enabled so that you can read the free articles. If you don't have cookies enable we would pass an error page (otherwise the paywall would be easy to bypass).

Can you say how this affects SEO? We would still like that Google would index all article pages that it does now.

Would it be cloaking if we treated Googlebot differently so that when it does not have cookies enabled, it would still be able to index the page?