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://moz.com/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
-
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 | | Ty19860 -
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Using "nofollow" internally can help with crawl budget?
Hello everyone. I was reading this article on semrush.com, published the last year, and I'd like to know your thoughts about it: https://www.semrush.com/blog/does-google-crawl-relnofollow-at-all/ Is that really the case? I thought that Google crawls and "follows" nofollowed tagged links even though doesn't pass any PR to the destination link. If instead Google really doesn't crawl internal links tagged as "nofollow", can that really help with crawl budget?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Would you rate-control Googlebot? How much crawling is too much crawling?
One of our sites is very large - over 500M pages. Google has indexed 1/8th of the site - and they tend to crawl between 800k and 1M pages per day. A few times a year, Google will significantly increase their crawl rate - overnight hitting 2M pages per day or more. This creates big problems for us, because at 1M pages per day Google is consuming 70% of our API capacity, and the API overall is at 90% capacity. At 2M pages per day, 20% of our page requests are 500 errors. I've lobbied for an investment / overhaul of the API configuration to allow for more Google bandwidth without compromising user experience. My tech team counters that it's a wasted investment - as Google will crawl to our capacity whatever that capacity is. Questions to Enterprise SEOs: *Is there any validity to the tech team's claim? I thought Google's crawl rate was based on a combination of PageRank and the frequency of page updates. This indicates there is some upper limit - which we perhaps haven't reached - but which would stabilize once reached. *We've asked Google to rate-limit our crawl rate in the past. Is that harmful? I've always looked at a robust crawl rate as a good problem to have. Is 1.5M Googlebot API calls a day desirable, or something any reasonable Enterprise SEO would seek to throttle back? *What about setting a longer refresh rate in the sitemaps? Would that reduce the daily crawl demand? We could set increase it to a month, but at 500M pages Google could still have a ball at the 2M pages/day rate. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhao0 -
How does having multiple pages on similar topics affect SEO?
Hey everyone, On our site we have multiple pages that have similar content. As an example, we have a section on Cars (in general) and then specific pages for Used Cars, European Cars, Remodeled Cars etc. Much of the content is similar on these page and the only difference is some content and the additional term in the URL (for example car.com/remodeled-cars and /european-cars). In the past few months, we've noticed a dip in our organic ranking and started doing research. Also, we noticed that Google, in SERPs, shows the general page (cars.com/cars) and not the specific page (/european-cars), even if the specific page has more content. Can having multiple pages with similar content hurt SEO? If so, what is the best way to remedy this? We can consolidate some of the pages and make the difference between them a little clearer, but does it make that much of a difference for rankings? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathonOhayon0 -
How does badly formatted HTML affect SEO?
Our website uses a custom built CMS, but uses a fairly standard WYSIWYG text editor. I've looked at some of the code it produces, and it's not pretty. My gut feeling tells me that this extra bloat is bad for SEO. Am I right in thinking that Google doesn't look kindly upon badly formatted and bloated HTML? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
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