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To comply with the European cookie law, we should implement cookie wall. But search engines should be able to see and index actual page content not cookie wall.

Searching online I found that many people recommend checking user-agent and feeding actual content for bots and crawlers and show cookie wall for real users. Popular WordPress Cookie wall plugins also implement this way by checking bots & crawlers/real users

My question is: Does google count this as content cloaking and penalize SEO ranking or not? Or is there another way to implement cookie wall without affecting SEO ranking

user1412699
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Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.

Cloaking takes a user to other sites than he or she expects by disguising those sites' true content. During cloaking, the search engine spider and the browser are presented with different content for the same Web page. HTTP header information or IP addresses assist in sending the wrong Web pages. Searchers will then access websites that contain information they simply were not seeking, including pornographic sites. Website directories also offer up their share of cloaking techniques.

Many of the larger search engine companies oppose cloaking because it frustrates their users and does not comply with their standards. In the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, cloaking is considered to be a black hat technique that, while used, is frowned on by most legitimate SEO firms and Web publishers. Getting caught cloaking can result in huge penalties from the search engines, including being removed from the index altogether.

So, yeah, this count as cloacking.

Josip Ivic
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Put the cookie disclaimer in an <aside> element. Make sure you initialise this with some internet explorer js code as it's HTML5 only. Google will generally ignore these based on their content, position and it's relevance to the rest of the page.

Mr Lister
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L Martin
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  • Unfortunately this, not a viable option due to the regulations. You are not permitted to place ANY non-functional cookies on a users computer without explicit confirmation. – xvilo Apr 04 '18 at 16:19
  • If this is in reply to GDPR, then the statement is false. Only cookies used in a manner to identify a user are subject to an explicit opt-in. You're also looking at an answer from 2016 and GDPR comes into affect in May 2018. – L Martin Apr 06 '18 at 12:38
  • So, that are `non-functional` cookies, am I correct @l-martin? – xvilo Apr 06 '18 at 14:50
  • You're incorrect I'm afraid. This is about SEO optimisation on cookie text, and you're claiming that trying to mask this text from Google is a breach of laws not yet in place. This advice remains valid post GDPR. You also need to understand the difference between non-essential cookies and personally identifiable information. They are not the same thing. Holding settings for a chat app is acceptable - holding a unique number to identify a chat user is not. – L Martin Apr 10 '18 at 08:53