Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?

[NelsonF]

Hello everyone!

My German users will have to get a disclaimer according to German laws, now my question is the following:

Will a disclaimer affect crawling? What's the best practice to have regarding this? Should I have special care in this? What's the best disclaimer technique? A Plain HTML page? Something overlapping the site?

Thank you all!

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi friend, you can display the disclaimer using a JavaScript overlay and this would be absolutely fine. The bots won't have any trouble crawling the website behind the JS overlay as they won't see it. This is a very common practice among the websites that display age gate verification page like porn sites and sites that talk or sell liquor etc..

This technique is not considered cloaking as the intention is not malicious or deceptive and Google handles these normally. Hope it helps and Good Luck.

I addressed a similar question here on Moz:

http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/different-user-experience-with-javascript-on-off

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[NelsonF]

Maybe I will try as you said, will just wait to see if someone else responds so I can gather more ideas. Thanks though!

About cookies, yes, it's an Europe thing, but in Germany if you have an adult site, if you sell some type of products, etc, you have to display a disclaimer

[LesleyPaone]

Hmm, I honestly do not know in this situation. One thing you might try is to do a modal that blocks the page with a semi transparent layer, but check if it is googlebot accessing the site and not do a modal.

But honestly, I thought it was a cookies thing being in the EU so I am not an expert in this area.

[NelsonF]

Thanks for the input! while the site will not be pornographic it will include art nudity and I want to have a disclaimer that covers at least a portion of teh page

[LesleyPaone]

Don't block the site totally and it will not matter really. A lot of people in the e-commerce world do it like in this demo, http://warehouse.iqit-commerce.com/selector/?theme=warehouse2  Just a small bar on the bottom of the page. If you wanted to get even more clever, you could geographically target the user and show based on that and exclude bots from seeing it. But I would not suggest blocking the whole page like an adult site does if it is for cookies. If it is an adult site, that needs a full disabling disclaimer, I have no experience in that area.