Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
-
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!
-
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
-
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

-
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.
-
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 
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Will obfuscating HTML have a bad effect on my ranking?
I would like to obfuscate my HTML so that people do not see that I used a Template on my site. Does obfuscating HTML have a bad effect on the ranking in google? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Will the use of lightbox affect SEO?
I am looking to condense a features list on my pricing page. it is currently a static list however I want the user to click a button and a full list of standard features will pop up in a lightbox. How will this affect my SEO? Can Google read content in a lightbox?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParkerSoftware0 -
Will multiple domains from the same company rank for the same keyword search?
I'm trying to convince people that we need good marketing reasons for starting multiple domains, as it will be more difficult to rank multiple sites. Does anyone know if Google actively discourages multiple domains from the same company appearing in the search results for the same keyword? We are creating a separate content website which is related to an existing company website. Would you agree that is best to have these sites on one domain with the content site on a sub-domain perhaps? I'm worried about duplication of effort and cross-keyword targeting in particular. These sites would not have duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Do widgets and gadgets affect SEO?
I have added a number of widgets and gadgets to my site that I suspect act like Iframes. If true do these widgets and gadgets and the content that they are linked to help or hurt my site from an SEO perspective? Examples are facebook gadget, wordpress blidget, weather gadget, google maps widget.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Will using a service such as Akamai impact on rankings?
Howdy 🙂 My client has a .com site they are looking at hosting via Akamai - they have offices in various locations, e.g UK, US, AU, RU & in some Asian countries. If they used Akamai, would the best approach be to set up seperate sites per country: .co.uk .com .com.au .ru .sg etc Although my understanding is that Googlebot is located in the US so if it crawled any of those sites it would always get a US IP address? So is the answer perhaps to go with Akamai for the .com only which should target the US market and use different / seperate C class hosts for the others? Thanks! Woj
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wojkwasi0 -
Factors that affect Google.com vs .ca
Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"! 🙂 Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com. One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com. Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobM4161