Google doesn't forbid or de-index paywalls. What they forbid is cloaking (showing Google different content than what users will see). This is, of course, quite

Google doesn't forbid or de-index paywalls. What they forbid is cloaking (showing Google different content than what users will see). This is, of course, quite critical to maintaining search quality. WSJ is free to institute a full paywall and only serve snippets to Google. They might now like what it does to their rankings though. What they cannot do is continue to sniff the UA before deciding to put up the paywall. (Though I'm still able to use the Google trick, so it seems the experiment might have ended.)