Google Plus is now offering users more freedom on who can access their content. New feature improvements now make it possible to limit access to your content based on reader’s age and location. This will come in handy especially in situations where the laws of certain countries restrict specific types of content from being exposed. In this post, we take a look at how you can configure Google Plus pages to restrict users by age and location.
Users who have been so restricted will not be able to see posts made by your page as well as certain information that is displayed in the About tab of your page. Users can however view the page name, the profile photo, the cover photo, local information such as the address, phone number and user reviews. Photos, communities, comments made from the page, hangouts, events, reviews and Google + content other than posts will also be viewable. Any YouTube content will also be viewable unless otherwise restricted according to YouTube policies.
The latest settings will currently impact all your posts, but Google is saying that it may expand coverage of the restriction to other content in future. Users who have signed in to Google and who have provided their age in their account setups will be affected by the application of these restrictions. If users are not signed in to Google, they will still be prevented from seeing content that is age restricted. However, location restrictions won’t apply for users who are signed out. As far as search engines and crawlers go, the restricted settings won’t affect visibility.
If you want to apply these age and location restrictions, here’s what you need to do.
Configure Google Plus Pages to Restrict Content
1. Open up your Google+ page and click the Home drop-down on the top left of the screen.
2. Click Pages and then click Manage this page on the page you’d like to manage, if you have more than one page.
3. From the top left corner, from the Business dropdown, choose Settings. Alternately, you can click the cog wheel icon on the cover photo and select Settings.
4. On the Settings page, select the Audience tab.
5. In the Audience page, click the Target audience dropdown and choose any of the options listed below:
- Anyone
- Users 18 and older
- Users 21 and older
- Alcohol-related, for pages with alcohol-related content.
- Custom for pages that you want to set unique age controls based on location.
For Custom restrictions, you have additional options to apply.
- Under Global settings, from the Who can view my content? drop-down, select whether anyone, no one, or only users over a minimum age should be able to see your posts by default.
- In the Country-specific settings add a country and select who can view your settings as per your needs. Just remember that these country specific settings will override any global settings that you have applied previously.
After you configure the settings, check the box that says that you have read and applied the settings in compliance with all relevant laws and click Save.
While applying these restrictions makes more sense to businesses than individuals, if you feel that your Pages could do with some controls, go ahead and configure Google Plus pages to restrict content by age and location.
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