I think WSJ is wrong in saying that they are being punished by Google for their paywalled articles appearing last in search results. Google has algorithms that

I think WSJ is wrong in saying that they are being punished by Google for their paywalled articles appearing last in search results. Google has algorithms that would need to actually crawl the entire content, to ensure that it will provide the most relevant result. If it is unable to crawl the entire content, then it becomes just as hard to rank the same in the result. Changing the algorithms to rank simply on the title and the first few (free introductory) paragraphs of articles behind paid subscription can lead to more bogus results. Google knows that invalid search results in turn disengages their users from perusing their search engine.