As we covered yesterday, Google is launching flexible sampling as their new more relaxed method of the first click free program. So basically publishers have more control on how Google serves and ranks their subscription based content in search.

But someone asked if Google will be labeling content in the search results as being being a paywall or subscription based content and Google’s John Mueller said “It’s the same as with FCF, you wouldn’t see that in the search results at the moment.” He said this on Twitter.

But earlier this year, Google did show you these labels, here is a screen shot from Search Engine Land:

Sometime recently, probably with the release of this flexible sampling feature, Google removed the mention of the “paid subscription” label from the Google News label description page. It is gone now but it use to say:

So maybe Google won’t be labeling these paywalls or subscription based content in search anymore or maybe they will. Who knows…

Forum discussion at Twitter.