Restriction ignored by Search

Thank you for your feedback.

Is it only the title of the pages that are visible, or is it all content (before –MORE–)?

All the content before –MORE– is visible. I suspect the excerpt (manual or automated) is visible for posts.

Not sure if the theme makes a difference in this behavior. I’m using a theme based on underscoreS.

I will look into it. The case with –MORE– is actually a feature (when viewing a single page).

If you create an Access Level for Page A with option Tease: Page B, then, when unauthorized users try to view Page A, they can only see content before the –MORE– tag. The rest of the content is replaced with content from Page B.

You can use this feature the same way some news websites include a “paywall”, i.e. the users can read the first section of an article and then see a message about logging in/signing up.

I don’t know if I made myself clear. The issue is when using the WP search feature like mysite.com/?s=search+this+word.

By default, that page displays the_excerpt for each page that matches the search parameter. A user may expect the content to be completely hidden while in fact the first 55 words are visible in search results.

–MORE– just shortens the excerpt, which works as long as you remember to use it on all restricted page.

I can confirm this is a bug. The way I want to fix this is that:

1. If the page is restricted by a “redirect”, it will completely hidden from search
2. If the page is restricted by a “tease”, it will be displayed accordingly, i.e. an excerpt along with a teaser.

That sounds like a good solution. I also noticed plugins like Yoast can pull some of the text into meta description field. That’s not as bad since the snippet is much smaller.

I doubt you’ll want to check against all plugins. Search makes sense since it’s a core functionality. It may just be a matter of educating the user about the potential of other plugins to ignore the restrictions.

Thanks for letting me know about the WordPress SEO issue. The main goal is to make the plugin be compatible with as many plugins as possible without doing any specific integrations. For popular plugins, however, I might add modules or code for those specifically, just like you see the built-in modules already.