One SEO professional asked John Mueller about age interstitials and how they could impact crawling and indexing.
Their question is: if a website requires users to verify their age before showing any content, by clicking a button to continue, is it possible that Google could have problems crawling the site?
If so, are there any guidelines around how to handle this?
John explained that depending on the way that this is configured, yes, it’s possible there may be issues surrounding crawling the site.
In particular, Googlebot does not click on any buttons on the page. So it’s not like Google would be able to navigate through an interstitial such as this, if there is a legal interstitial for example.
And especially if it’s something that requires age verification, then people have to enter something and click on a Next button.
Googlebot won’t really know what to do with these types of form fields. That means if this interstitial is blocking the loading of any other content, then that would block crawling and indexing also.
One simple way to test this is just to search for some of the content that’s behind the interstitial. If you can find the content on Google, then that probably means that they were able to actually find this content.
From a technical point of view, what you do need to watch out for is that Google is able to load the normal content of the page.
And, if you want to show an interstitial on top of that, using JavaScript or HTML, then this is perfectly fine.
But, Google needs to be able to load the rest of the page also. This is the most important part here.
And that also means that if you’re using some sort of redirect to a temporary URL, and then redirecting back to your page, that won’t work.
But, if you’re using JavaScript or CSS to display an interstitial on top of your existing content that’s already loaded, then this would work for Google search. From a policy point of view, this is fine.
It’s not something that Google would consider to be cloaking, because the content is still being loaded there.
This happens at approximately the 08:20 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 08:20
Okay, let’s see, what do I have next here: If a website requires users to verify their age before showing any content, by clicking a button to continue, is it possible that Google would have problems crawling the site? If so, are there any guidelines around how to best handle this?
John (Answer) 08:40
So depending on the way that you configure this, yes, it is possible that there might be issues around crawling the site. In particular, Googlebot does not click any buttons on a page. So it’s not like Google would be able to kind of navigate through an interstitial like that, if you have something that is like some kind of a legal interstitial.
And especially if it’s something that requires verifying an age, then people have to enter something, and then kind of click Next. And Googlebot wouldn’t really know what to do with those kinds of form fields. So that means if this interstitial is blocking the loading of any other content, then probably that would block indexing and crawling as well. A really simple way to test if this is the case is just to try to search for some of the content that’s behind that interstitial.
If you can find that content on Google, then that probably means that we were able to actually find that content. From a technical point of view, what you need to watch out for is that Google is able to load the normal content of the page. And if you want to show an interstitial on top of that, using JavaScript or HTML, that’s perfectly fine. But we need to be able to load the rest of the page as well. So that’s kind of the most important part there. And that also means that if you’re using some kind of a redirect to a temporary URL, and then redirecting back to your page, that won’t work.
But if you’re using JavaScript, CSS, to kind of display an interstitial on top of your existing content that’s already loaded, then that would work for Google search. And from kind of a policy point of view, that’s, that’s fine. That’s not something that we would consider to be cloaking, because the content is still being loaded there. And especially if people can get to that content ever—after navigating through that interstitial, that’s perfectly fine.
