Googlebot and restricted areas

[vinchenzison]

Hi,

Does or can googlebot crawl restricted areas of a contao website?

I would like this answer to be yes. You may ask why?
I have pages that users need to accept the terms and conditions to before viewing them. Instead of having everyone signing up for membership, I have a hidden login form with pre-set guest credentials that submits when the user clicks Agree, thus showing the restricted pages.

I have done it this way, because the client doesn't want someone to be able to access a page directly from a link without first confirming the terms first or be able to see the hidden menu points until then.

Thanks

[qrczak]

Maybe something like this (in HEAD section of your template):

if (agreeCheckBox == 1) {
echo = "<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">";
}else{
echo = "<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">";
}

[vinchenzison]

Hi

I'm not sure if that will work. Checking with a googlebot sim, it reports the hidden/protected pages as type 301 Moved Permanently.
My agree button is more than just a checkbox. It's basically the membership login with out the user having to enter credentials because these are already set in hidden form fields and as far as I'm aware, google doesn't follow forms, only links.

Maybe there is a different way of restricting users to pages through use of a cookie or session but I'm not sure how I'd implement that.