A friend of mine on Twitter PM’d me on a question about getting around age verification. A common website-level SEO problem most somewhat questionable websites have is protected content (or in the SEO world, gated content). Fishing around for ideas, I picked up some great tips from our friends at SEOMoz.org; fortunately I’m a PRO Member or I may never had discovered these solutions.

Displaying Age Verification on a Web Site to Users and Not Search Engines

Below are two answers the gurus at Moz came up with to solve the problem of getting past gated content:

randfish
My suggestion would be to serve a CSS overlay that blocks out the page content visually and requests the age verification. This can be in the code of the website, so technically, search engines and users are seeing the same thing. This way, there’s no risk of cloaking and you’re still providing the age verification to every possible visitor, regardless of user-agent or IP address. This will only break down for mobile users, whose browsers may display the overlay differently. If you can live with the mobile issue (or use a separate stylesheet for mobile users), this solution should be a perfectly elegant one.

An example of what Rand is referring to above can be seen here, well at least the code to build something similar. CSS is a great way to do some pretty brilliant scripting. Be sure to place your actual CSS code in a file (such as style.css) in folder on the server (such as /css/) and be sure block it in the robots.txt file using Disallow: /css/.

Here’s another tip:

Oatmeal
I would trigger the age verification using a mechanism that a search engine would ignore – through javascript or cookies, for example. Detect if the user has javascript enabled or if they are accepting cookies and if they are either pop open the age verification form using some CSS/overlay wizardry or redirect them to a separate page (whatever makes the most sense for website).

JavaScript is another chunk of garbage that can increase page load time and be scrutinized by the search engines. Be careful with JavaScript and if you are going to use it, be sure to follow the same robots.txt rules as you would for CSS (separate file, separate folder, Disallow: /scripts/).

Hope this helps those of you struggling with how to display age verification on a website to users and not to search engines. Just be careful and don’t be afraid to use the Google Blog as a place to get feedback. If you ever feel like a technique may be “black hat”, it probably is and you probably should look for a better solution.

You’re not going to believe how the ‘Experts’ manipulate their HTML to increase their position in the search engine results pages (SERPS). This special technique has nothing to do with complicated code. In fact, your 3rd Grader in beginning HTML could probably do it for you. Read more below.

It use to drive me nuts when the SERPS returned results with links to pages that weren’t built with CSS, had only ONE PAGE, and yet managed to topple the Fortune 500 companies in the top 3 results. Then I discovered their secret, and I’m totally sold on the methodology.

Here’s the philosophy behind the process: Build the user appearance for the users and the source code for the search engines.

Learn Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

If you’re not using style sheets yet, then chances are you have a ton of unneeded font tags and formatting in your source code. The more unneeded formatting you have, the more difficult it is for search engines to figure out what your topic is about. You’re probably not utilizing the heading tags (H1-H6) either, since without style sheets they appear huge and ugly.

Whether you have to take a class or learn from tutorials at W3 Schools, I highly advise learning Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Apply the User-View Formatting with CSS

Strip away those formatting tags and add custom styles to text you want your views to see emphasized. Remove all HTML formatting tags, such as Emphasize, Bold, Italics, Strong, Underline, etc. Make your webpage look exactly the way you want your users to see it using your Cascading Style Sheet tags.

Apply Optimized Formatting with HTML

Now get your 3rd Grader to format your source code for the search engines. Use these guidelines as a start:

• Use the H1 tag once for your main topic (include keywords)
• Use the H2 tag 1-3 times for your subtopics (inc. keywords)
• Use the H3 tag 1-3 times to support your H2 tags.
• Wrap formatting tags (bold, strong, etc) around your keywords.
• Use the FONT tag to make one line (w/keywords) HUGE, like +7
• Never (ever) use the same keywords twice next to each other.

There are a lot of other formatting techniques that help, but the ones above have the largest impact to this HTML / CSS scripting strategy. Please note that in order for this to work, you must comply with SEO Best Practices; which means no keyword stuffing, using 200 or more non-keywords on the page, compliance to META tag usage guidelines, etc

Apply CSS to Formatting Tags

So now your page looks goofy with huge header tags, funky bolding, underlining, emphasizing, etc. all over the page. Fix this using your Cascading Style Sheet by modifying your H1, H2, H3, Strong, Emphasize, and other tags until they match the appearance of your web site.

One of the CSS styles I’ve created I call .normalize. This style has the following attributes:

.normalize {
  font-size: 1em;
  font-style: none;
  text-decoration: none;
  font-weight: normal;
}

Apply .normalize anywhere there’s an instance you don’t want your views to see – like that FONT SIZE=+7 we discussed earlier. You won’t need this for your standard HTML formatting tags, as you should have already modified those in your style sheet.

Check Your SEO Work with a Validator

The best SEO #OOPS#yzer I’ve found is at ScrubTheWeb.com. However, Web Position also has suite of excellent validators. Both of the above validators check keyword density, keyword proximity, META Tags, and HTML tags. ScrubTheWeb.com actually offers a tool that simulates a search engine spider – so you can see (pretty much) exactly what the search engine spider sees when it visits your page.

The Result of the HTML / CSS Source Changes

The result from the above scripting will help you maintain your site’s look and feel, including formatting, while optimizing your source code for the search engines. Instead of reading a ton of font tags and strange emphasizing, the search engine spiders will now be reading h1-h3 tags and formatting tags that are wrapped around your page’s keywords.

Give it a shot. You should see a difference in ranking within a couple of weeks, so long as you’ve got a decent PageRank and are getting crawled at least once per month.