Does google crawl a website's content if the website has a signup gateway (can only access the content after signing in)? My website requires a user to register (log-in with facebook) before a user can access the content and I'm concerned that this is hurting me from an SEO perspective if the written content within isn't factored in. Is there any way around this if I want to continue with a log in gateway?
No they cannot see the content if you require a password, that would be hacking if they circumvented that anyhow. The only exception is forums which typically allow bots to crawl and index the sites even if they are password/login required. In your situation I doubt that you have setup special rules to allow bots to crawl your site but not users. In this case your SEO is absolutely hurting because as far as Google can tell there's no real content on your site. Keep in mind that if you do allow Google and search engines to crawl your site and yet require password for normal users they can still get around it. Atleast the sophisticated users can change their browser info or just check Google cache for the content.
Thanks! Any tips on how I can allow search engine to crawl my site while requiring normal users to log in?
We need more info before answering your questions: 1. what kind of login mechanism is it? 2. Are you using robot.txt in the member area? 3. If you remove the facebook login code for a while, can ppl read your contents as usual? If so, then its ok for google to crawl your contents.
That's something that most likely your plugin and gateway doesn't offer. You will need to hire a programmer to fix it for you, it really is a quick and easy fix.