I'm designing a (multi-page) website for a small brand that is to sell alcohol. I don't have all that much experience building a website, but know enough to get the job done. The only problem I've come across so far involves age verification of visitors, which sites of this nature are required to have by law. I can think of various ways to write a script and design a page/pop-up for such a feature, but I've never really had to concern myself with SEO before and so I don't know what approach to take. Since it's a multi-page website, it's important that crawlers will be able to get past the age verification so that they can index other pages.
My first idea was to make it so that each page simply redirects to a seperate age verification page until the user has confirmed their age (stored in a cookie), unless their user-agent is in a list of common webcrawlers, but that seems to negatively impact SEO from what I could gather (not to mention that it will block out webcrawlers that are not included). My next idea was to make it so that a PHP script checks whether or not the user has already verified their age (storec in a cookie): if they have not, it will echo a popup-like div that covers the entire page and contains a form that asks for your birthdate. This way, users would be unable to view the actual content of the page until they've verified their age, while crawlers would still be able to properly index the page. After some research however, it seems like that *might* cause problems with indexing or result in penalties on search engines, but I can't find a definitive anwser.
I was hoping someone here might be able to help me out. Is my current idea SEO-friendly? And if not, what is a right way to include SEO-friendly age verification on a website? I would prefer a way to do it purely in PHP, but it wouldn't be much of a problem if I had to use Javascript (including jQuery) to accomplish it. My only real limitations are having to specifically ask the user for a birthdate and not using external plugins or tools.
Whether or not you anwser, thank you for even considering helping me out by taking time out of your day to read my post.
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/hcm1x4/age_verification/>
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