I find myself explaining this quite a bit since working with Coors and Co. and Miller Brewing Shop on their age-verification methodology, so I thought I’d do a blog post to answer some of the common questions surrounding this topic, which is becoming a major roadblock for alcohol, tobacco, and other age-restricted producers on the web.

Not surprisingly, the porn industry figured this out about 10 years ago.

What is Required of Age Verification and Why?

The beer brewing industry, like any smart industry of a certain age, has decided to voluntarily police itself, rather than risk government intervention in keeping minors away from their marketing materials, which can be costly, painful, and ultimately hurts business.

To that end, the Beer Institute has published some guidelines for brewers to follow, one of which is to ask people for their age before they can enter the site. Most brewers will also check information against a public records database before sending you a catalog anyway, so this is more a proactive measure.

So, the reason you need to fill in your age on every beer site is because breweries would rather police themselves than be policed by M.A.D.D. and the government.

How Does Age Verification Interfere with Search Marketing?

Most breweries want to provide a branded page where they can verify a user’s age, and then deliver underage visitors to a page talking about their commitment to keeping alcohol away from minors (once again, to show that they are policing themselves).

For the typical developer looking at this requirement, this is a simple redirection to a form page and then a decision based on subtraction to another page. The craftier dev. will also include logic to forward the verified user back to the page they were originally trying to visit.

However, this poses a problem for search engine robots, who cannot verify their age (most of them are younger than 21, anyway). All they ever see is the age verification page, never the products. This results in them never showing the brewer’s site for no-brainer product searches like “coors mug” or “zima hat.”

You may think this isn’t such a big deal, but let’s take a look at a current example.

Last month, 110 people searched for “bushmills shirt.” That’s 110 people looking for a specific product. A Bushmill’s owned site is nowhere to be found in the search results, but there is a perfectly good selection of Bushmills’ shirts right here. You’ll have to verify your age to see that link, and remember they’re in the UK, so it’s day first, then month (that’s another post for another day).

Checking Google’s cache of that page reveals the problem. Bushmills is redirecting un-verified visitors to their age verification page.

Bushmills is missing out on anywhere from 1-110 t-shirt sales each month. And there are other searches as well, “bushmills hat” “bushmills glass” etc.

I have a list of over 100 alcohol brands. Of those, only a handful do age verification properly (literally 4 or 5). Some of them have blogs, images, and recipes locked up behind age-verification redirects. How much would it help a vodka brand to come up for a search of “Red Bull and Vodka Recipe” (bad example, who doesn’t know how that works?).

Incidentally, if anyone from DiaGeo is reading this, I would like to talk to you about helping with the Age-Verification on some of your apparel stores.

Tags: age verification, alcohol tobacco, miller brewing, porn industry, proactive measure, public records database, search engine robots, verification methodology

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 8:11 am and is filed under Organic Placement (SEO), Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.