Impact of cookie consent banner ?

[JorgeV]

Hello,

On mobile devices, my cookie consent banner, is taking between 1/3 and half of the screen (depending of devices). So it covers a big chunk of the content. Considering that Googlebot is rendering pages as they would on a mobile device, my question is, am I (are we) penalized for having this banner covering part of the content?

[JesterMagic]

I had wondered that myself. I recently implemented the cookie consent (along with a number of other things) so I am unsure of the affect yet. It may be difficult for me to tell as some other new features like lazy load of images affect SEO as well.

[RedBar]

Why not use a much small baner? If you want to see precisely what is deemed as acceptble then look absolutely no further than this link:

[gdpr.eu...]

[RedBar]

BTW, the above link is not an offical EU site even though it is co-funded by the EU!

If you really want to see the EU rigmarole go here, you'll wish you hadn't:

[ec.europa.eu...]

[lucy24]

Does the banner go away after the user takes some action, such as clicking “Yes, I accept” or “No, I don’t want cookies”? If so, that new expanded page is what the search engine will see.

[iamlost]

My consent ‘banner’ modal window covers up to 80% of a mobile device window; and has been in both test and current form for over 2-years now without any noticeable Google (or other SE) effect.

Back in engine’s August 2018 thread GDPR might be causing higher bounce rate [webmasterworld.com] I noted that in initial testing visitor bounce rate increased 57% but had settled down to a modest 6% increase over non-modal window. Note that that was (1) before almost anyone else was doing anything other than faux cookie ‘advice’ banners, and (2) shown to everyone not just those in EU.

Now that such banners are fairly common albeit still mostly vague hand wave faux compliance visitors are much more accustomed to their presence. Such it is not so much the banner existence as it’s UX design that determines bounce.

However, to reiterate: Google and other SEs have no problem with GDPR or ePrivacy opt-ins in my experience, the effort needs be invested in mitigating human visitor bounce.