cloaking or not?

age check

[danielmarkus]

We run a website with content about alcohol. For this reason we need to protect the pages for minors from entering. Therefor we use an agecheck with dropdowns where people need to specify their birthdate.

Spiders can't get behind this age check so our pages are not indexed. Now we have this plan:

We build in some check that is only fired when the page is opened in a browser. If the page is not opened in a browser -if a spider comes by- no checks are done. Alle pages can be indexed. If they are shown in SERPS people go to the page, they get the age check and after verification they are shown the same page as in the SERP.

Will this be considered illegal cloaking or not?

[volatilegx]

It is a form of cloaking. I doubt you'd be penalized for it if a human were to review your case.

I think your choice of words, "illegal cloaking", is amusing. Cloaking is not a legal issue at all :)