There's an interesting difference between overlay paywalls like Wired uses, and content-not-loaded walls like WSJ uses. In the Wired case, they text is sent to you but they try to stop you from reading it. In the WSJ case, they don't even send you the text of the page you supposedly clicked on.
Since we're in the second case, this isn't even a decision by Google. The WSJ actually isn't sending you the data in the search result snippet, so the crawler rightly says "wow, nothing useful here". The complex, ideal solution might let me tell Google "search as though I'm a WSJ member", but short of that they're accurately assessing what content is actually available.
There's an interesting difference between overlay paywalls like Wired uses, and content-not-loaded walls like WSJ uses. In the Wired case, they text is sent to you but they try to stop you from reading it. In the WSJ case, they don't even send you the text of the page you supposedly clicked on.
Since we're in the second case, this isn't even a decision by Google. The WSJ actually isn't sending you the data in the search result snippet, so the crawler rightly says "wow, nothing useful here". The complex, ideal solution might let me tell Google "search as though I'm a WSJ member", but short of that they're accurately assessing what content is actually available.