How to add a disclaimer to a site but keep the content accessible to search robots?
-
Hi,
I have a client with a site regulated by the UK FSA (Financial Services Authority). They have to display a disclaimer which visitor must accept before browsing. This is for real, not like the EU cookie compliance debacle
Currently the site 302 redirects anyone not already cookied (as having accepted) to a disclaimer page/form. Do you have any suggestions or examples of how to require acceptance while maintaining accessibility?
I'm not sure just using a jquery lightbox would meet the FSA's requirements, as it wouldn't be shown if JS was not enabled.
Thanks,
-Jason
-
Joshua thanks for your suggestions.
Fixed div idea is good but not sure it will pass FSA compliance.
Google search appliance config article is interesting and provides some ideas but not sure how to go about implementing for Googlebot.
Suppose reverse dns lookup (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80553) may provide a solution. Was hoping someone that had implemented something similar may share their experience.
Cheers.
-
That is rough,
maybe a legitimate situation for user agent sniffing (albeit fraught with danger)? If you can't rely on javascript then it would seem that any option will have significant downsides.
This may be a hair-brained suggestion but what about appending a server parameter to all links for those who do not have a cookie set? if the user agent is google or bing (or any other search bot) the server could ignore that parameter and send them on their way to the correct page, however if the user agent is not a search engine then they would be forced to the disclaimer page.
This would allow for a user to see the initial content (which may not be allowed?) but not navigate the site, however it would also allow you to present the same info to both user and agent while making the user accept the terms.
Alternatively serve up a version of the page that has the div containing the disclaimer form expand to fill the whole viewport to non-cookied visitors and set the style to position:fixed which should keep the visitor from scrolling past the div, but it will still render the content below the viewport. Thus cookied visitors don't see a form but non-cookied visitors get the same page content but can't scroll to it until they accept the form (mobile does weird things with position fixe, so this again might not work, and a savy user could get around it).
Edit: Just found this article which looks promising. It is a google doc on how to allow crawls on a cookied domain https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/50/help_gsa/crawl_cookies might solve the problem in a more elegant, safe way.
Would be interested to hear what you come up with. If you could rely on javascript then there are many ways to do it.
Cheers!
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
-
Website URL, Robots.txt and Google Search Console (www. vs non www.)
Hi MOZ Community,
Technical SEO | | Badiuzz
I would like to request your kind assistance on domain URLs - www. VS non www. Recently, my team have moved to a new website where a 301 Redirection has been done. Original URL : https://www.example.com.my/ (with www.) New URL : https://example.com.my/ (without www.) Our current robots.txt sitemap : https://www.example.com.my/sitemap.xml (with www.)
Our Google Search Console property : https://www.example.com.my/ (with www.) Question:
1. How/Should I standardize these so that Google crawler can effectively crawl my website?
2. Do I have to change back my website URLs to (with www.) or I just need to update my robots.txt?
3. How can I update my Google Search Console property to reflect accordingly (without www.), because I cannot see the options in the dashboard.
4. Is there any to dos such as Canonicalization needed, or should I wait for Google to automatically detect and change it, especially in GSC property? Really appreciate your kind assistance. Thank you,
Badiuzz0 -
My site Has Penalized By google Search Result Without Any Spam Score.
I Recently Make a Site Gizmocombot.com. tHE aITE has NO spam Record NO lousy BACKLINK.it has all unique article can anyone tell us how we can unpenalized our site from google webmaster and google search Result. i attcead a screenshot as well yoou need. 3nzmALp
Technical SEO | | litoginamaaba3332 -
Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.
Back in October 2014 last year, a site we are working with had a significant drop in organic traffic. This coincided with Google's algorithmic update. The side in question uses filters extensively and at the time did not have any canonical tags in place. The lions share of these filter pages had little or no written content just products. The website now has canonical tags throughout and content has started to be added to the top level categories and we will continue to add more, however there is still a large amount of pages with little or no content. Webmaster tools shows that there are large amounts of internal links (for instance 42,000+ to the homepage) which must be due to the filtered pages. I am looking for advice on what is the best way to proceed. Do I edit robots.txt, start adding no follow tags or something else entirely?
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
Deleted/Merged Content on Site Migration
Hey Moz Community! Looking for some input on a site migration. When redirecting some old pages that aren't going to be moved over to the new site, do you prefer to redirect to a homepage (or similar page) or to throw up a 404/410 on the new site? What have you found works best?
Technical SEO | | iSTORM-New-Media1 -
Why would this site outrank a Pr2 site with higher domain authority?
I am trying to get a pr2 site to be on top 7 local spot for the keyword Van Nuys Bail bonds but have discovered a site which has barely any back links and is not even a year old on top results. Their backlinks are from lower authority domains than what we have. How could this site be beating a 7 year old pr2 website? The site I'm working on is http://bbbail.com/ The site that is ranking in 5th spot local with pr0 is http://www.vipbailbonds.org/ is it maybe because it is a .org site? Also I notice that all websites in top spots have www, could that be a factor as well?
Technical SEO | | jesse13410 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
Are aggregate sites penalised for duplicate page content?
Hi all,We're running a used car search engine (http://autouncle.dk/en/) in Denmark, Sweden and soon Germany. The site works in a conventional search engine way with a search form and pages of search results (car adverts).The nature of car searching entails that the same advert exists on a large number of different urls (because of the many different search criteria and pagination). From my understanding this is problematic because Google will penalize the site for having duplicated content. Since the order of search results is mixed, I assume SEOmoz cannot always identify almost identical pages so the problem is perhaps bigger than what SEOmoz can tell us. In your opinion, what is the best strategy to solve this? We currently use a very simple canonical solution.For the record, besides collecting car adverts AutoUncle provide a lot of value to our large user base (including valuations on all cars) . We're not just another leech adword site. In fact, we don't have a single banner.Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JonasNielsen0 -
How to prevent directory from being accessed by search engines?
Pretty much as the question says, is there any way to stop search engines from crawling a directory? I am working on a Wordpress installation for my site but don't want it to be listed in search engines until it's ready to be shown to the world. I know the simplest way is to password-protect the directory but I had some issues when I tried to implement that so I'd like to see if there's a way to do it without passwords. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0