Question posted in 
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
2
Answers
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.
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.