Hey all -- I have been hard at work lately putting together the code that will allow me to filter content for users who are under 18 years old. Some of my content is flagged as adult. These pages will prompt the user for their age (prompt them once - and save it as a cookie for 30 days) only when the page is an adult page OR if they haven't set an age cookie yet on the site. For an example of an adult page, visit: http://betterwindowssoftware.com/products-2996.html. Notice that all of the Google ads are missing - when compared to a non-adult page: http://betterwindowssoftware.com/products-82885.html I didn't want to do it, but rules are rules - and I'll possibly cause myself some kind of hit with the visitors. In the long term, it should be great for my site's reputation. I think that the big problem is that the Search Engines bots will be redirected to the "Verify your age" page for all content that is tagged as adult (or 18+). Since the BOTs don't take a cookie, how would I make sure that the BOTS get the content and not the "Verify your age" page?? Isn't there a META tag that should go on pages that makes this a bit easier?
Yeah with that technique bots wont be able to read the pages. Why do you want to index adult pages? are you planning to run adsense on it?
No, I just figured that I would lose traffic if they weren't indexed. I can say that early, a healthy portion of the traffic was coming for "hot and sexy" type screensavers, etc. I can say that this redirection does not impact the pages that are not set with the adult flag. The sad news is that only a few hundred of the listings are currently tagged - and there's a lot more that need the value. So, isn't there a way to detect that it's a BOT visiting the page -- and allow it to always view the page without the age-check (although, I'd seriously have to say that the BOT isn't 18 yrs old, so would I corrupt the engine?).
I don't want to have any pages removed from the index. I was trying to maintain all pages being indexed, but I feel that the age verification redirection that I'm doing will make all BOTs get redirected (since they can't have a "birthdate" cookie). There will be thousands of these "mature content" or adult pages, so I just need to figure a way to let the BOTs straight through to the content. Perhaps I should move this question to the PHP programming section of these forums.