Combining age verification and google indexing

Question

As spiders will generally not execute javascript i am thinking of taking one of the options below in order to successfully get them to index the content of a website that requires age verification.

My preferred solution:

Checking for a cookie 'ageverification'. If it does not exist, add some javascript to redirect the user to ~/verifyage.aspx which will add the required cookie and redirect the user to their previous page.

Another solution:

As above, but do not redirect the user. Instead, if the cookie doesnt exist, draw the age verification form 'over the top' of the existing page.

Another solution:

Add a 'Yes I am over 18' anchor link that a crawler can follow. I am slightly skeptical over the legality of this.

Any insight or ideas greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You've got a real problem either way.

If you let the crawler onto the age-verified portion of your site, then it has that content in its index. Which means it will present snippets of that to users who search for things. Who haven't been through your age verification. In the case of Google, this means users actually have access to the entire body of content you were putting behind the verifywall without going through your screener - they can pull it from the Google cache!

No-win situation, sorry. Either have age-verified content or SEO, not both. Even if you somehow tell the search engine not to spit out your content, the mere fact that your URL shows up in search results tells people about your site's (restricted) contents.

Additionally, about your JavaScript idea: this means that users who have JavaScript disabled would get the content without even knowing that there should have been a click-through. And if you display a banner on top, that means that you sent the objectionable content to their computer before they accepted. Which means it's in their browser cache. Or they could just hack out your banner and have at whatever it is you were covering up without clicking 'OK'.

I don't know what it is your website does, but I really suggest forcing users to POST a form to you before they're allowed to view anything mature. Store their acceptance status in a session variable. That's not fakeable. Don't let the search engine in unless it's old enough, too, or you have some strong way to limit what it does with what it sees AND strong information about your own liability.