I usually do not post anything about the company that I work for in my personal blog, but I thought that this is something significant enough to the industry that I decided to bend my rule, just this once (with permission):
If I have not mentioned this before, I work for Van Gogh Vodka, and we have recently been updating our website. While brain-storming ideas for the site, we devised a novel solution to a particular problem for the spirits industry. Like everyone else on the web we are becoming more aware of SEO, and it is here that we ran into a bit of a conflict.
It is very important to us to make sure that we do everything that we can to not advertise to minors. The way that most companies, including us in the past, deal with this is to have their home page be an age-verification page with minimal branding. This works fine for the users as it gives them a chance to determine if they want to view the content of the following pages or not. The problem is that all of the content that the search engines are looking for is now buried one level deep in the folder structure, thus lowering the rank of the page versus if the content were to be on the front page. It has always been a choice of responsibility over ranking.
Now, with the power of javascript we are able be both responsible and SEO-friendly. By using a simple ModalBox, when the page loads for the first time that session, and an associated cookie, we are able to completely remove the age verification from the html, while still keeping a similar user experience.
Amazing, AJAX helping SOE…
If I have not mentioned this before, I work for Van Gogh Vodka, and we have recently been updating our website. While brain-storming ideas for the site, we devised a novel solution to a particular problem for the spirits industry. Like everyone else on the web we are becoming more aware of SEO, and it is here that we ran into a bit of a conflict.
It is very important to us to make sure that we do everything that we can to not advertise to minors. The way that most companies, including us in the past, deal with this is to have their home page be an age-verification page with minimal branding. This works fine for the users as it gives them a chance to determine if they want to view the content of the following pages or not. The problem is that all of the content that the search engines are looking for is now buried one level deep in the folder structure, thus lowering the rank of the page versus if the content were to be on the front page. It has always been a choice of responsibility over ranking.
Now, with the power of javascript we are able be both responsible and SEO-friendly. By using a simple ModalBox, when the page loads for the first time that session, and an associated cookie, we are able to completely remove the age verification from the html, while still keeping a similar user experience.
Amazing, AJAX helping SOE…
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