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
-
If content is at the bottom of the page but the code is at the top, does Google know that the content is at the bottom?
I'm working on creating content for top category pages for an ecommerce site. I can put them under the left hand navigation bar, and that content would be near the top in the code. I can also put the content at the bottom center, where it would look nicer but be at the bottom of the code. What's the better approach? Thanks for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
Is a canonical tag the best solution for multiple search listing pages in a site?
I have a site where dozens of page listings are showing in my report with a parameter showing the page number for the listings. Is the best solution to canonical these page listings back a core page (all-products)? Or, do I change my site configuration in Webmasters to ignore "page" parameters? What's the solution? Example URL 1- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=84 Example URL 2- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=85 Example URL 3- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=86 Thanks in advance for your direction.
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
IIS 7.5 - Duplicate Content and Totally Wrong robot.txt
Well here goes! My very first post to SEOmoz. I have two clients that are hosted by the same hosting company. Both sites have major duplicate content issues and appear to have no internal links. I have checked this both here with our awesome SEOmoz Tools and with the IIS SEO Tool Kit. After much waiting I have heard back from the hosting company and they say that they have "implemented redirects in IIS7.5 to avoid duplicate content" based on the following article: http://blog.whitesites.com/How-to-setup-301-Redirects-in-IIS-7-for-good-SEO__634569104292703828_blog.htm. In my mind this article covers things better: www.seomoz.org/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis. What do you guys think? Next issue, both clients (as well as other sites hosted by this company) have a robot.txt file that is not their own. It appears that they have taken one client's robot.txt file and used it as a template for other client sites. I could be wrong but I believe this is causing the internal links to not be indexed. There is also a site map, again not for each client, but rather for the client that the original robot.txt file was created for. Again any input on this would be great. I have asked that the files just be deleted but that has not occurred yet. Sorry for the messy post...I'm at the hospital waiting to pick up my bro and could be called to get him any minute. Thanks so much, Tiff
Technical SEO | | TiffenyPapuc0 -
Duplicate content with "no results found" search result pages
We have a motorcycle classifieds section that lets users search for motorcycles for sale using various drop down menus to pick year-make-type-model-trim, etc.. These search results create urls such as:
Technical SEO | | seoninjaz
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Triumph&vehicle_category=On-Off Road&vehicle_model=Tiger&vehicle_trim=800 XC ABS We understand that all of these URL varieties are considered unique URLs by Google. The issue is that we are getting duplicate content errors on the pages that have no results as they have no content to distinguish themselves from each other. A URL like:
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Triumph&vehicle_category=Sportbike
and
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Honda&vehicle_category=Streetbike Will have a results page that says "0 results found". I'm wondering how we can distinguish these "unique" pages better? Some thoughts:
-make sure <title>reflects what was search<br />-add a heading that may say "0 results found for Triumph On-Off Road Tiger 800 XC ABS"<br /><br />Can anyone please help out and lend some ideas in solving this? <br /><br />Thank you.</p></title>0 -
How to do a no follow on site search
We have a site search that is causing a huge amount of errors as the SEOmoz crawler is showing these as duplicate content. Our first thought was to do a no-follow on the site-search directory, but we realized that the site search is /site-search.aspx and URl strings appear at the end for hundreds of pages. How dow we/how can we no-follow an undetermined amount of URL strings?
Technical SEO | | Apptixweb0 -
Google search result going to a page that I did not put on my site
Hi, I am seeing a very strange result in google for my site. When doing a search for the term "london reflexology" my site comes up 18th in the results. But when I click the link or check the URL it shows up as: http://www.reflexologyonline.co.uk/reflexologyonline.php?Action=Webring This is not right at all. It looks like some sort of cloaking but I am not sure. I am new to SEO and I do not know why goole is showing this URL that does not exist on my site and of witch the content is totally wrong. Can anyone please help with this? See the 2 linked images for more details. It seems to me the site might be hacked or something to that effect. Please help.... jyJdP.png 71Mf4.png
Technical SEO | | RupDog0 -
Different TLD's same content - duplicate content? - And a problem in foreign googles?
Hi, Operating from the Netherlands with customers troughout Europe we have for some countries the same content. In the netherlands and Belgium Dutch is spoken and in Germany and Switserland German is spoken. For these countries the same content is provided. Does Google see this as duplicate content? Could it be possible that a german customer gets the Swiss website as a search result when googling in the German Google? Thank you for your assistance! kind regards, Dennis Overbeek Dennis@acsi.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a main sales page and then we have a country specific sales page for about 250 countries. The country specific pages are identical to the main sales page, with the small addition of a country flag and the country name in the h1. I have added a rel canonical tag to all country pages to send the link juice and authority to the main page, because they would be all competing for rankings. I was wondering if having the 250+ indexed pages of duplicate content will effect the ranking of the main page even though they have rel canonical tag. We get some traffic to country pages, but not as much as the main page, but im worried that if we remove those pages and redirect all to main page that we will loose 250 plus indexed pages where we can get traffic through for odd country specific terms. eg searching for uk mobile phone brings up the country specific page instead of main sales page even though the uk sales pages is not optimized for uk terms other than having a flag and the country name in the h1. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | -Al-0