SEO Question - Google not getting past cookies?

I'm completely stumped on an SEO issue and could really use some direction from an expert. We built a website recently, http://www.ecovinowines.net and because it is开发者_JS百科 all about wine, we set up an age verification that requires the user to click before entering the site. By using cookies, we prevent the user from accessing any page in the site before clicking the age verification link. It's been a couple of months since launching the site so I thought I'd check out some keywords on google. I just typed in the name of the website to see what pages would be indexed and it is only showing the age verification pages. From the googling I've done, apparently nothing behind the age verification will be visible to the google bots because they ignore cookies.

Is there no safe workaround for this? I checked out New Belgium's site, which uses a similar age verification link, and all of it's pages seem to be getting indexed. Once you click on one of it's links from google, it redirects the user to the age verification page. Are they not using cookies? Or how might they be getting around the cookie bot issue.

Do a test for Google bot's User agent and allow access if it matches. You might want to let other search engines through too...

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)

msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

ia_archiver

Semi-official response from the Google:

This topic comes up periodically for sites (alcohol, porn, etc.) that need to serve an age verification notice on every page. What we recommend in this case is to serve it via JavaScript. That way users can see the age verification any time they try to access your content, but search engines that don't run JavaScript won't see the warning and will instead be able to see your content.

• http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Tools/browse_thread/thread/3ce6c0b3cc72ede8/

I think a more modern technique would be to render all the content normally, then obscure it with a Javascript overlay.

I had a quick look at New Belgium and it's not clear what they're doing. Further investigation needed.

Assuming you are using PHP, something like this will do the job. You'd need to add other bots if you want them.

$isBot = strpos($_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’],"Googlebot");

Then you can toggle your age verification on or off based on that variable.