Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?

    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?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    6
    1605
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • NelsonF
      NelsonF last edited by

      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!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Devanur-Rafi
        Devanur-Rafi @NelsonF last edited by

        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://moz.com/community/q/different-user-experience-with-javascript-on-off

        Best regards,

        Devanur Rafi

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • NelsonF
          NelsonF @LesleyPaone last edited by

          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 🙂

          Devanur-Rafi 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • LesleyPaone
            LesleyPaone @NelsonF last edited by

            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 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • NelsonF
              NelsonF @LesleyPaone last edited by

              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 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • LesleyPaone
                LesleyPaone last edited by

                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.

                NelsonF 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • SeoBlogs61

                  Moving site from www to non www and also hosting to vps what will be the effect?

                  shared hosting to vps www to non www

                  Hi SEO gurus,
                  I am trying to move my site from shared hosting to VPS hosting and also moving from www to non www version.
                  What is the best possible way to avoid any issue and without losing the backlinks.
                  Is it good or bad to do? URL: https://buylikesservices.com/

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoBlogs61
                  0
                • Ty1986

                  Why is Amazon crawling my website? Is this hurting us?

                  Hi mozzers, I  discovered that Amazon is crawling our site and exploring thousands of profile pages. In a single day it crawled 75k profile pages. Is this related to AWS? Is this something we should worry about or not?  If so what could be a solution to counter this? Could this affect our Google Analytics organic traffic?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty1986
                  0
                • BandG

                  Crawl Stats Decline After Site Launch (Pages Crawled Per Day, KB Downloaded Per Day)

                  Hi all, I have been looking into this for about a month and haven't been able to figure out what is going on with this situation. We recently did a website re-design and moved from a separate mobile site to responsive. After the launch, I immediately noticed a decline in pages crawled per day and KB downloaded per day in the crawl stats. I expected the opposite to happen as I figured Google would be crawling more pages for a while to figure out the new site. There was also an increase in time spent downloading a page. This has went back down but the pages crawled has never went back up. Some notes about the re-design: URLs did not change Mobile URLs were redirected Images were moved from a subdomain (images.sitename.com) to Amazon S3 Had an immediate decline in both organic and paid traffic (roughly 20-30% for each channel) I have not been able to find any glaring issues in search console as indexation looks good, no spike in 404s, or mobile usability issues. Just wondering if anyone has an idea or insight into what caused the drop in pages crawled? Here is the robots.txt and attaching a photo of the crawl stats. User-agent: ShopWiki Disallow: / User-agent: deepcrawl Disallow: / User-agent: Speedy Disallow: / User-agent: SLI_Systems_Indexer Disallow: / User-agent: Yandex Disallow: / User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 (crawler@brightedge.com) Disallow: / User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /cart/ Disallow: /compare/ ```[fSAOL0](https://ibb.co/fSAOL0)

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BandG
                  0
                • swapnil12

                  Is it good or bad to add noindex for empty pages, which will get content dynamically after some days

                  We have followers, following, friends, etc pages for each user who creates account on our website. so when new user sign up, he may have 0 followers, 0 following and 0 friends, but over period of time he can get those lists go up. we have different pages for followers, following and friends which are allowed for google to index. When user don't have any followers/following/friends, those pages looks empty and we get issue of duplicate content and description too short. so is it better that we add  noindex for those pages temporarily and remove noindex tag when there are at least 2 or more people on those pages. What are side effects of adding noindex when there is no data on those page or benefits of it?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | swapnil12
                  0
                • CFCU

                  Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective

                  Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this.  We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU
                  1
                • paulissai

                  Do low quality subdomains affect the ranking performance/quality of a root domain?

                  Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai
                  0
                • djlittman

                  If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?

                  I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org.  Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains.  I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman
                  0
                • RoxBrock

                  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 | | RoxBrock
                  1

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.