Typically our clients target consumers over the age of 18, but occasionally we work with clients who have products or services that are going to be marketed to children under the age of 13. These issues fall under COPPA compliance and Google search.

For those of you who don’t know what COPPA is, COPPA stands for the Child Online Privacy Protection Act, and details how marketers can advertise to children and use their information and when to collect consent from a child’s parent or guardian. Websites targeted for children under the age of 13 can still take advantage of search engines. Google gets around this by saying in its terms and conditions that you must be over the age of 13 to use Google products. So Google can deliver results to people who have authenticated their age (or logged in as their parent).

However, you can further make your website in compliance by registering the site with Google as one whose audience is under 13 years of age. Here is how:

• Register and verify your website with Google webmaster tools.
• Once you are registered, go to the Tag for Child-Directed Treatment and register your site as a child directed site or service.

After you register, it will take Google a number of weeks to start to designate your site as a child directed service. This will mainly affect things like AdSense ads, and may or may not affect search results. Google has been mum on that subject.