Should I hide the content inside the cookies law compliance banner from search engines?

Question

I am working on my first website.I am working on the last steps before deploying it. Now I am facing the law compliance requirements.

Right now it is mandatory by GDPR to show the cookies compliance banner to users so they can see how my company uses their data. Does all this content, all this HTML, affects my SEO? Should I mark it as an Aside HTML section? Can I somehow tell the crawler to skip this part of the page? What is the common way to deal with this problem?

Answer 1

It's fine, there's no need to hide it. Google knows these things need to exist, and having one will not hurt your SEO. Indeed, many large sites, e.g., Android and Google themselves, don't hide their consent pop-ups.

John Mueller from Google has spoken about this (as well as related concerns around penalties for intrusive popups and interstitials) at some length. In summary, his only real concern is that the underlying page content remains indexable.