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
-
Will I be flagged for duplicate content by Google?
Hi Moz community, Had a question regarding duplicate content that I can't seem to find the answer to on Google. My agency is working on a large number of franchisee websites (over 40) for one client, a print franchise, that wants a refresh of new copy and SEO. Each print shop has their own 'microsite', though all services and products are the same, the only difference being the location. Each microsite has its own unique domain. To avoid writing the same content over and over in 40+ variations, would all the websites be flagged by Google for duplicate content if we were to use the same base copy, with the only changes being to the store locations (i.e. where we mention Toronto print shop on one site may change to Kelowna print shop on another)? Since the print franchise owns all the domains, I'm wondering if that would be a problem since the sites aren't really competing with one another. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdenPrez0 -
XML sitemap generator only crawling 20% of my site
Hi guys, I am trying to submit the most recent XML sitemap but the sitemap generator tools are only crawling about 20% of my site. The site carries around 150 pages and only 37 show up on tools like xml-sitemaps.com. My goal is to get all the important URLs we care about into the XML sitemap. How should I go about this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl0 -
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?
I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content. My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code. Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content? It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod0 -
Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?
Hi all, I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console. This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiseDE
Lise0 -
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 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How is Google crawling and indexing this directory listing?
We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why. If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site? Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content. For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems. Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result? For example: Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed? Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0