Does an age verification home page hurt SEO?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

There's a microbrewery in our area that just launched its first website. It has the "verify your age" homepage (which is not really their homepage, but I don't know what it's called) before you can enter. It looks like this: http://angrychairbrewing.com/

Anyway, does this hurt them at all from a rankings standpoint? Also, assuming bots/spiders/ROGER can crawl sites like this, (which I think they would have to be able to do) how do they get around this verification?

Thanks,

Ruben

[benjaminmarcinc]

Im just taking a stab at it that because there is limited content that the search engine may rank the pages once you enter your age. If there is a low search volume for the name of the micro brewery it may get indexed. Ive seen these before, i understand they don't want under age people visiting the website but they can add more content and pictures on the site, that can't hurt. Hope this helps.

[DennisSeymour]

You'd still want the other pages of the site to show up on Google so it defeats the purpose of just having the homepage show that, either way, it will be complicated if I pushed for that and forced redirects, so I would just make it simple and introduce an unblockable popup that logs IPs for that instead of making that verification page the actual home page. That way, I get to keep my optimized homepage and you can make the most of popups like introducing sharing/signups etc.

For easy niches, Ive made these things rank in the past but it's been a long time since I've worked on a site that still use verifications that way. It might be harder this time, but if it's easy enough, optimizing that page with some more content and targeted meta details should still work like a charm.