Work Around for Age Requirement

Need a se friendly work around for a site with age requirments.

[smeyler]

Client of mine is an adult beverage company that requires that anyone visiting the site be of age. On their homepage, one must select their age to gain entrance. Accordingly, only their homepage is indexed.

We would like to institute a solution whereby the search engines can index the site content, but users coming from the SERPs would still be re-directed to the age verification page.

What is the best way to do this?

[caveman]

IP delivery. Basically, if you use IP delivery, you can serve your normal pages to the bots, and redirect regular users where you wish. However, I don't know the legal issues on sites like this, so keep in mind that any solution that allows bots to see the pages but not average users (until they sign in) is imperfect, because if a bot can reach a page, a user who knows what s/he's doing can reach it too.

P.S. I've never worked on a site like this, so other users may have additional thoughts, or experience that they could add.

[jimbeetle]

You might also want to give some consideration to using the noarchive meta. Looking at a couple of popular booze brands, the sites appear to be fairly well indexed, but both Google and Yahoo have the pages cached.

This brings up an interesting situation. Though you're blocking underage folks from accessing the pages, they can be accessed from an SE cache. Since caching is opt-out and not opt-in, who's actually responsible for making the pages available, the adult beverage company or the SE?

[plumsauce]

Seems like there must be a deadline on for this.

I am working on the same request right now, in the same industry, with even more stringent requirements.